Designing A Next-Gen Ionic Thruster! (For Flight)

this airflow is resulting from a very special type of Thruster using an exotic type of power you see the early 1900s saw all forms of high voltage Innovation Violet wands were curing sore wrists and crippled knees radio was captivating the world and ignition coils led to a new form of ground transportation fast forward to 2018 and MIT took to the skies with an ionic thrust airplane the ah they beat me to it their design was brilliant and included aspects from a decades-old device called an ionic lifter which we'll talk more about later but it honestly got me thinking you know what is a Step Beyond the classic ionic lifter design jet turbines are an evolution of the propeller so what is the evolution of ionic thrust well after weeks of routing sanding cutting measuring grinding welding winding and gluing here's my attempt to answer that this is a multi-stage ionic Thruster unlike a traditional fan or turbine it doesn't use moving parts to accelerate air it uses specialized electrodes and a family-friendly 40 000 volts you could say I'm a fan oh [Music] ionic thrust is still in its infancy it's kind of an emerging text so to speak and if that's your thing you will love what keysight technologies is gearing up for let's take a look it's a huge virtual event called keysight World innovate where industry leaders experts and legit futurists will share their vision of the future state of Technology their topics are pretty epic including 5G and 6G Tech Electric and autonomous vehicle advances Quantum technology digital Twins and Ai and what's crazy is keysight World innovate is a free four-day event each day is about 90 minutes and includes two Keynotes from industry leaders as well as a panel discussion dates and times vary depending on location but it starts with the Americas which runs from October 4th to the 7th and Europe's event kicks off on October 11th there are also dedicated events for other countries and languages so basically it's a big deal I left a link down below so I'll see you there okay at its fundamental level ionic wind is actually pretty simple it's essentially air movement resulting from a DC electric field with high enough voltages a sharp positive electrode will ionize the surrounding air molecules that's the glow you see and what's coming up later those charged molecules are then repelled away and attracted to a wider ground electrode in the process they bump into other neutral air molecules and end up creating a flow of wind in that dedicated Direction called Electro hydrodynamic thrust or if you're not a schmuck you just called ionic wind ionic lifters take this to the next level and are wonderful at demonstrating thrust using ionic wind when a high DC voltage is applied usually from a big external power source air flows downward from a thin suspended wire towards the grounded metal body which causes lift it's a design that's time tested tried and true so I'm going to borrow from it and since this next-gen Thruster is kind of a newer idea I had a few requirements for my build first I need to determine what relationship voltage and thrust share so I needed an adjustable high voltage Supply and thanks to one of my patreons it was a cinch thank you luckily I've built many voltage multipliers over the years and I had a spare one sitting around when powered by this 10 kilovolt flyback Supply that was donated to me it provides anywhere from 10 to 60 kilovolts which I can simply tap into for each test second is there an Optimum spacing between electrodes I don't know so I'd like the distance between electrodes to be adjustable and lastly thrust to weight ratio is super critical if this is ever going to be a feasible idea so I want to keep this build really light maybe under a pound pound and a half [Music] foreign with weight in mind I cruised out to plasma Plastics to gather my supplies I found some lighter materials and began the massacre [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] thank you [Music] so it took a little bit longer than I'd like because I redesigned it twice but here's the final result each circular support contains a length of wire to act as the positive electrode and these neon green squares hold the ground electrodes the positive electrodes are wired together in parallel and the negative electrodes are wired in parallel as well so all the segments receive power at the same time it's a little more fragile than I'd prefer but I'm excited partly by chance it ended perfectly within my weight limits at just over a pound [Applause] [Music] this entire build was about creating thrust right so I needed to find a quantifiable way to measure airflow in the first place well after a quick Amazonian search I found this incredible little wind meter for cheap which can measure down about 0.1 meters per second this will provide quantitative measurements I also bought some yummy strawberry candles to qualitatively show any air currents that develop for the upcoming testing I built this stand that serves a couple of really important purposes so first of all it holds everything in place it stabilizes it but most importantly it provides electrical isolation from whatever surface it's being tested on to start out I set spacing randomly at an inch and a half making sure that all sections were identical and selected a random voltage of 20 kilovolts here goes nothing good operation ow that's gonna leave a mark so round two I'm gonna give it a lot more voltage and I realized that the candles were out of the way the airflow in the first place so I've lifted them up into the path of Destruction I really hope this works because I spent a lot of time building this oh hahaha yeah it works a lighter didn't stand much of a chance either and could be blown out as far back as three or four feet off camera I'm assuming the airflow coming out of this is somewhat laminar let's take a look [Music] that's so cool super exciting um I still want to be able to visualize the airflow though and I think I have a solution [Music] little chunk of dry ice is going to do wonders in terms of visualizing the airflow God [Applause] converging inwards I was curious about the hard numbers though so in came the wind meter I started spacing at one inch and tapped the third stage from the multiplier providing 33 kilovolts as you can see this led to a velocity of 1.6 meters a second next I selected one stage higher on the multiplier providing 45 kilovolts this led to an increase in velocity up to 1.9 meters per second I then selected a higher stage providing 56 kilovolts and fire hose that baby with that change it broke 2 meters a second finally I tapped into the highest voltage I was willing to test at 66 kilovolts and cross my fingers this also led to an identical wind velocity of 2 meters a second I repeated this process for 1.5 inch and 2 inch spacing which provided really clear data two inches results in abysmal velocities of 1.3 meters a second 1.5 inches showed an increase up to 1.8 meters a second and one inch spacing was king at 2 meters per second placing them together shows a pretty obvious trend up to this point I've just used uniform spacing so what about staggered spacing I've got it set up with inch and a half from the front inch and a quarter in the middle and one inch spacing in the back let's try that oh that's a huge increase staggered spacing was a total Underdog and provided a 15 higher velocity at 2.3 meters a second I was pretty happy with the numbers but then I decided to turn out the lights and what you're about to see is why I love this field of physics [Music] God it's just the most gorgeous display of plasma I've ever seen it's like a plasma force field and the still frames are on a whole new level I could look at these all day let me know in the comments if you want to see more of these okay so for this design about 45 kilovolts and staggered spacing produce the fastest airflow at 2.3 meters a second which consumed about 90 watts of power but what does that equate to in terms of thrust well as opposed to calculating I chose to measure it in real time with the help of some nylon spacers I've got the Thruster turned upside down so that it's sucking in air at the base and then actually thrusting upward so it's pressing down on the scale I've got about an inch Gap at the base to let additional airflow in let's do this initiate screaming banshee okay 21 grams of throw oh 22 grams of thrust that's not bad 22 grams of thrust isn't a bad start it's actually the weight of this empty can right here and the Thruster weighs 490 grams so that's about a 4.5 thrust to weight ratio at around uh 4.1 watts per gram of thrust that might not seem like much but I already know some design changes I can make to shave the weight by 50 while effectively doubling the effect of airflow so this design has a potential of 18 percent but is this series stack design an improvement over a single stage design in the first place 2.3 meters a second was with power being provided to all the segments at once in parallel so I'm going to disconnect power to the first segment and see how that affects velocity you moment of faith after disconnecting various stages I found the answer is yes two stages results in a 33 increase and three stages a 50 increase in velocity this design represents my attempt at improving ionic thrusters and I'd like to call it the BSI Thruster it's also the first step towards me designing an ionic thrust airplane of my own design I love how it turned out but it does have some inefficiencies I'm thinking of three in particular let me know in the comments down below if you think you can spot those three areas and whoever's closest will get pinned otherwise just let me know your honest thoughts on this build I do plan on a version 2 of this Thruster so if you enjoyed what you saw you might want to subscribe so you don't miss out also I'll leave a link to keysight's event in the description down below as well as a link to the new plasma Channel merch massive thank you to all the patreons who just continue to uplift my work and thank you for watching you Stay classy

Channel: Plasma Channel

Views: 3,763,888

Keywords: “Water bending”, Water bending, controlling elements, Avatar, Plasma, physics, Science, Discovery, High Voltage, “High Voltage”, “Voltage multiplier”, Tesla Coil, Vandergraff Generator, Electrostatic, “static electricity”, Lightning, Electronics, Plasma globe, Plasma Channel, Jay, Plasma Nation, Van Der Graaff, Marx generator, high power, Ozone, Ionic wind, Corona, revolver, steam powered, explosion, target practice, shooting range, shoot, archery, space, jet turbine, rocket

Id: nrEBoPYS4ns

Length: 11min 45sec (705 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 17 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/porkchop-sandwiches]

pretty dope

[u/hctibemnab]

bad ass