Uncovering China's New Electric Plasma Jet Engine

so the aviation industry produces 12 of all carbon emissions in the transport sector and can produce up to three times as many carbon emissions per mile than a conventional petrol car so it's not surprising that there's been a lot of focus into how these emissions can be reduced the most notable of which being electric flight however there are still a few challenges to fully commercialize long-haul electric flight for the most part these electric planes use propellers or electric ducted fans which produce more thrust for a given size and this is because they have fewer tip losses these losses come from the formation of vortices at the end of a blade that cause resistance to the spinning propeller these form due to differences in pressure above and below the blade however in a ducted fan there's not enough room for these vortices to form additionally all the airflow is forced into the desired direction however ducted fans don't come without extra weight and drag caused by the housing though the thrust from these electrical systems is nothing compared to that of a conventional jet where air is drawn into the system compressed combined with jet fuel and ignited as the air and fuel mixture ignites it heats up and expands creating a high velocity jet which is shot out of the back subsequently turning a turbine this is quite an over simplification but i'll leave a link to a video below that goes into some more detail if you're interested so how can electrically propelled aircraft reach the level of thrust achieved by a conventional jet engine well a team of researchers from wuhan university think they may have found a possible solution this jet utilizes ionized air plasma induced by microwaves to convert electricity into thrust this is not to be confused with ion thrusters that shoot out positively charged ions of a gas such as xenon as a side note ions are either positively or negatively charged atoms that have either gained or lost one or more electrons here in this ion thruster the xenon gas is ionized by knocking out an electron using other electrons in the ionization chamber these positive ions are attracted to a negatively charged grid and shot out of the back at incredibly high speeds as they shoot out the back an electron is also reintroduced to neutralize the ion and preventing it from being attracted back to the thruster this is an invention straight out of science fiction however it produces only a tiny amount of thrust and cannot even overcome the friction of earth's atmosphere let alone propel a commercial plane though in the vacuum of space this is not an issue and over time the tiny amount of thrust compounds to enough force to move a whole spaceship but i digress how does this new plasma jet work well instead of xenon gas it uses air around it and much like current fuel jets it compresses the air before heating it up so it can expand out of the back to create increased thrust where it gets interesting is when we look at how the air is heated and to understand this is useful to first look at lightning so plasma is a gas of ions and free electrons and plasma is the fourth state of matter alongside solid liquid and gas it is also thought to be the most abundant state of matter in the universe plasma is formed when the gas is provided with enough energy to free an electron and turn the atoms into ions this is commonly achieved with high temperatures such as in the sun or high electrical fields such as lightning what this means is lightning turns the air around it into plasma and because the plasma is conductive it allows the lightning bolt to continue its path in this electric jet instead of high electrical fields or high temperatures concentrated microwaves are used to provide the energy to the compressed air to ionize it this ionized air is ignited with an electrical spark that causes the now conductive air plasma to heat up much like the air plasma around lightning this air plasma reaches over a thousand degrees celsius and expands into the tube to create thrust out of the back the scientists that discovered this found it produces a similar amount of thrust to a combustion jet engine per square meter however this is a laboratory scaled experiment so it is unlikely to be this effective when scaled up the scientists found that when running a 400 watt jet engine they got 11 newtons of thrust with four newtons of that coming purely from the compressed air which equals around 28 newtons per kilowatt however this was a faster air flow rate and at this flow rate there were no tests for higher powered microwaves causing questions about how this might scale but we'll work with what they provided with a tesla model s battery pack running at 310 kilowatts this creates a thrust of 8500 newtons using the thrust to weight ratio of a large commercial plane like the 737 which is about 0.3 it means that if this was scaled up the electric jet could fly a plane of approximately 3 tons which given the weight of a battery pack for the tesla model s weighs about half a ton leaves 2 and a half tons for well everything else a plane needs obviously this is in its infancy and the energy density of batteries means that this hypothetical flight might still be short-lived but is an interesting development nonetheless additionally this power consumption doesn't seem to include the power required to compress the air although these limitations may seem disheartening maybe there will be more breakthroughs that take this idea to a commercial level only time will tell looking back over 100 years to the wright brothers first 12 second long flight it's hard to believe where we are now who knows maybe this electric jet technology could power the rockets of the future and take us to colonize mars either way i hope you enjoyed this video and leave a like if you learned something new make sure to subscribe for more content within the world of sustainable technology and business i've left a link to the paper and some other informative videos below and i'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: Ziroth

Views: 3,670,878

Rating: 4.7923293 out of 5

Keywords: Science, Engineering, STEM, Electric, Zero, Tesla, News, Research, EV, Battery, plane, space, spacex, aerospace, jet, engine, china, olf, future, education, ion, thruster, plasma

Id: zreTrshsg-c

Length: 6min 30sec (390 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 27 2020