With no visible exhaust and no roaring jet or whirling propeller—no moving parts at all, in fact—the aircraft seemed silently animated by an ethereal source. “It was very exciting,” Barrett says. “Then it crashed into the wall, which wasn’t ideal.”
But Barrett and his team figured out three main things to make Version 2 work. The first was the ionic wind thruster design. Version 2’s thrusters consist of two rows of long metal strands draped under its sky blue wings. The front row conducts some 40,000 volts of electricity—166 times the voltage delivered to the average house, and enough energy to strip the electrons off ample nitrogen atoms hanging in the atmosphere.
When that happens, the nitrogen atoms turn into positively charged ions. Because the back row of metal filaments carries a negative charge, the ions careen toward it like magnetized billiard balls. “Along the way, there are millions of collisions between these ions and neutral air molecules,” Barrett notes. That shoves the air molecules toward the back of the plane, creating a wind that pushes the plane forward fast and hard enough to fly.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/silent-and-simple-ion-engine-powers-a-plane-with-no-moving-parts/
Will the craft be electrically charged or is the charge fully in the medium in which it is flying?
ReplyDeleteYou can almost see someone designing a large enough version of this to create windstorms, perhaps affecting the weather. Just saying, probably not possible. Maybe I'll delete this later on.
ReplyDelete...And power a windmill turbine to create electricity.
ReplyDeleteWhat kinds of NOx pollution comes about from N ions reacting with O2 molecules in the air?
ReplyDeleteA hard rain's a gonna fall. :-)
ReplyDelete