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Anybody interested in exotic propulsion methods and devices should perhaps also consider these promising and practical technologies.
Here are a few that I would love to play with:
1) Hall effect thrusters principles, small thrust but efficient. However, how about using these same principles to build a device for operation in the atmosphere? The principles involved are simply the Lorentz force arising from current flow in a magnetic field that produces the accelerating thrust. Imagine if the air was so much denser we could have so much more thrust, but the air will be harder to ionize at higher pressures, but we could feed RF through the air next to the surface electrodes and than feed a heavy DC current through the ionized air which is now conductive, and we can have our thrust if we also have a static magnetic field present at 90 deg to the current flow. Or maybe we can do all of this with AC current and magnetic field of the same phase. I believe this is one of the principle behind some very exotic air vehicles.
2) Years ago I talked with an elderly gentlemen who was a WWII veteran from a European east-block country. He had a long career in the military afterwards and was petty high up in the intelligence community of his country. He shared with me the fact that the intelligence community believed the Nazi scientists had perfected a form of light propulsion that was very advanced and orders of magnitude more powerful than lab bench experiments. I never took this story too seriously, until a few years ago when I discovered that an intense burst of energy from a camera flash produces a strong impulse on a black or even a mirrored surface. The propulsion method is very simple in concept, the light hits the surface and heats up the air boundary layer rapidly, and the more energetic air particles expand and push against the hull of the aircraft as well as against the slower moving particles of the air. It's a form of skin propulsion, you explode thin layers of air around your aircraft to push you forward. I believe Boeing's facilities are experimenting with this type of propulsion method, but with actual rocket fuels not light sources. I was thinking, how about rapid heating from high current impulses through thin conductive strips on the outside of the aircraft? The substrate would have to be something that does not conduct heat very well so it allows for maximum temperature rise time, maybe aerogels would do the trick, they are good insulators and also lightweight. Anyway, in order for light propulsion to work, or any boundary layer heating method to work, the heat rise time would have to be fast and furious and repeat periodically fast enough to get practical levels of thrust. A few years ago there was a Gulfbreeze UFO report, and somebody saw this disk from the ground relatively close from the underside, and he describes a type of propulsion similar to what I described here.
3) Than there are the electrodynamics methods, antennas, etc... this can be a lot of fun too, but it's a bit more complicated.
EM
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Topic: Asymmetric Capacitor (Read 25095 times)
