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In my more energetic days after grad school, I was working for a defense contractor and interacted with a lot of interesting folks, some had worked at JPL even. During that time, I learned about the lifters that people were playing with and asymmetrical capacitors in general, and I decided to developed my own Method of Moment code for calculating the net force on a asymmetric capacitor discretized with a fine grid. At first I obtained a small net force or thrust and that got me very excited, but later I realized it was due to numerical error introduced by the fact that this was a discrete model not a continuous and smooth curved model. So I made the grid finer in hopes of convincing myself the force might be real, and this net force just became smaller with a smaller grid size, than I refined the grid even more and the force went down even more, almost to 1e-16 N if I remember correctly, all of this while using high voltages like 1e6 volts, which were producing forces on the plates on the order of hundreds or maybe thousands of newtons, and that's when I realized that the forces will always balance out and there is no loop hole, just like theory dictates. So yes, the small thrust observed is due to the ionic wind as proved by NASA and others.
On the other hand, if one desires field propulsion, an almost certain requirement is that we use electroDYNAMICS, not STATICS.
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Topic: Asymmetric Capacitor (Read 25117 times)
