These Planes Are Propelled With Ionic Thrust

hey everyone today i'm going to be showing you how to make an ion propulsion jet what if there was a way to create thrust or lift without any moving parts and without high temperatures well it is possible through ionic propulsion or ionic thrust so first let me explain how i'm creating the wind that's going to generate the thrust now if you just have two electrodes that have the same geometry like this the electric field on both sides of these is going to look about the same if you look at the electric field lines they're going to look about like this so whether you're on this side or this side the strength of the electric field is about the same but that all changes if we put something pointy on one of the electrodes so let's say i wrap some aluminum foil around this with a pointy end right here now because of the point right here the electric field is going to be more concentrated around the point than on this end so now we kind of have an asymmetrical electric field going on it's stronger on this side than on this side and because it's really strong at the point right here what it can do is it can actually rip some electrons off of the air molecules around it and once it rips an electron off an air molecule let's say we have a positive oxygen molecule now it's going to want to move to the negative side but on the way because there's other air molecules around it it's going to bump into those air molecules and so it's going to get recoiled and bounce back the other way but it's going to push some neutral molecules this way so what that means is if we ionize some air molecules it's going to create a generic neutral wind that gets pushed this way now the wind is not charged it's neutral but it's going to get propelled from the ions hitting them and because the moving ions recoil and go back towards the positive it's going to create some thrust on this electrode here so it actually is going to push it a little bit because those positive ions are moving towards a positive electrode and that electric field will kind of push it a little bit so the physics behind it is you're throwing neutral wind this way and it's pushing against the electrode this way and this wind is so strong i can actually blow out a candle with it let me show you okay so i'm gonna light a candle right behind this electrode here and we should see right when i turn on the voltage it's going to generate a flow of air that's going to blow out the candle turn on the voltage three two one and it blew it out so this is pretty amazing we're able to generate wind without any moving parts so i showed you the movement of air that can be produced but i haven't shown you how it can produce thrust yet so now to show you the thrust that can be produced instead of having a stationary point on the electrode i'm going to have a point that can actually rotate so it can actually move so you can actually see the force on the pointy part pushing it so to this electrode here i'm just gonna let this balance on this top here so if there's any force on this tip here it's gonna cause it to spin in a circle okay now let's turn on our voltage three two one okay so it immediately spins in a circle so the reason it's spinning in a circle is because it's creating this neutral wind this way and that wind is causing the ions to get pushed back towards the positive electrode which pushes it in a circle like that and what's cool about this is you don't just need to have the point on the positive electrode you can also put on the negative one as well and it creates the same effect and what that means is if we can create a plane that has an onboard power supply that can generate this high voltage all you need is the pointy end pointing away from the direction you want to go it will create this neutral wind that moves this way and pushes the aircraft this way but this is just to connect it to the power supply there's nothing on the power supply that's going to make these spin the spinning is going to come completely from the thrust at the back of the plane here okay here we go let's turn on our power supply three two one there it goes knock it the other way now you may have heard of ionic thrusters before in relation to propulsion in space so why don't we test out if you can actually use this method to propel something in a vacuum so let's put our spinning propeller thing in the vacuum chamber and see if it can spin with no air we're at a full atmosphere right now so you can see that it's easily spinning in there but let's turn on the vacuum and see what happens three two one still spinning at a half an atmosphere we're at .25 atmospheres in there still going it might be slowing down though okay we're at point one atmospheres now so we're getting down to a pretty good vacuum in there but there's still some air okay so you can see it's still spinning in there we're at a pretty good vacuum now but it's still getting a little bit lower you can't see on the gauge there but this is definitely not spinning like it was at full atmosphere oh it looks like it's stopping i think it's stopping it's trying to go and it stopped okay so we're at a full vacuum now and it's not able to propel itself forward using that ionic thrust so you can see without air it can't push itself forward because the thrust is actually coming from the ions hitting the neutral air when there's no neutral air there it can't push itself forward but now once we let the air back in okay let some air back in and then it starts going again okay so we're back at full atmosphere you can see that it's spinning like crazy in there all right so you can see that the ionic propulsion wasn't able to work in the vacuum so why has nasa been looking at ion propulsion systems to work in space well the reason it didn't work in our case here is because we were relying on the air around us to be moved and pushed the aircraft forward so all you need to do to get an ion thruster to work in space is you need to bring the gas with you there's no gas in space around you so you supply the gas that's going to get propelled out the back and the way it's going to get propelled is not through combustion like a typical rocket booster but you're actually going to propel it using these electric forces and cause it to be ionized create this neutral wind that gets ejected out the back and it pushes the aircraft forward now what's really cool about these ion propelled aircrafts is you can make them really small in fact researchers have been working on a drone that has no moving parts that uses this ionic propulsion to propel it through the air and it's only the size of a coin now i've seen some researchers in papers that suggest that ionic propulsion can actually get very efficient if you do it right so maybe in the near future we won't have planes that have to use jet fuel but they can actually use stored electric power convert it into electrical energy and use ionic propulsion so they have ion jets instead of combustion jets hey everyone thanks for watching another episode of the action lab i hope you enjoyed it if you did don't forget to subscribe if you haven't subscribed to my channel yet and also hit the bell so that you can be notified when i release my latest video and thanks for watching and i'll see you next time

Channel: The Action Lab

Views: 2,753,086

Keywords: ionocrafts, lifter, ionocraft lifter, the action lab, physics, ion thrusters, ion propelled aircraft, ion booster, ion thruster, space travel, ion engine

Id: VSYwaesDQBw

Length: 8min 40sec (520 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 07 2021