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Silent and Simple Ion Engine Powers a Plane with No Moving Parts
- TremendousJudge 8y agoCompared to other unmanned electrical flying craft, would this type be more durable in non-stop flight conditions?
- tyingq 8y agoThis would have to be pretty light given the low thrust, so durable isn't the first thing I think of. Or does durable have some special meaning with aircraft?
- TremendousJudge 8y agoI just meant "being able to fly around without any maintenance being performed on it"
- tyingq 8y agoAhh, okay..."no moving parts". I get it now.
- Junk_Collector 8y agoIn theory. It could be made with no moving parts and steered via thrust vectoring by varying the location of the negative voltage. Lightweight high voltage equipment like that is very expensive to make at those reliability levels currently, but the idea of an operational window of a year+ doesn't seem like a pipe dream. We'll probably see applications in military intelligence (spying) and drug smuggling before other more civilian uses.
- erbium 8y agoEfficiency of this model is only 2.56%, so... probably not yet.
- ohiovr 8y agoSounds like lifters. Would it produce a lot of ozone pollution?
- detritus 8y agoThat's exactly what I was just wondering and trying to read up on (I'm incredibly ignorant about this sort of thing)... https://www.quora.com/How-is-air-ionized-and-what-does-that-mean https://www.quora.com/How-is-air-ionized-and-what-does-that-... "Air ionisation can cause the following: forming of ozone molecules Ozone is produced naturally in the stratosphere when highly energetic solar radiation strikes molecules of oxygen (O2), and cause the two oxygen atoms to split apart in a process called photolysis. If a freed atom collides with another O2, it joins up, forming ozone(O3). Most of the ozone in the stratosphere is formed over the equatorial belt, where the level of solar radiation is greatest. The circulation in the atmosphere then transports it towards the pole . So, the amount of stratospheric ozone above a location on the Earth varies naturally with latitude, season, and from day-to-day."
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- naringas 8y agoso with a lot of these flying about we can use ozone-depleting substances (ODS and CFCs) once again?
- detritus 8y agoAt the very least, it seems like there might be some prospect of combining the battery and voltage upticking tech here with the likes of the solar-powered Zephyr [1] which can fly at about 20km, which is apparently about the denser part of the ozone layer [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qinetiq_Zephyr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qinetiq_Zephyr [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_layer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_layer , in particular: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/cb/Ozone_altitude_UV_graph.svg/300px-Ozone_altitude_UV_graph.svg.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/cb/Oz... - ed I suppose it would make more sense to pair the battery and voltage conversion tech with a high altitude balloon covered in thin film PV, so there's less competition between 'ozone generation' and the 'lift generation'.
- prossercj 8y agoThis is really cool. > “In Star Trek you have shuttlecraft gliding silently past,” he says. “I thought, ‘We should have aircraft like that.’” It's a good sign when inspiration comes from Star Trek. Edit: Also, reminds me of this: https://xkcd.com/2072/ https://xkcd.com/2072/
- comboy 8y agoBeing separated by vacuum sure helps to keep these shuttlecraft silent though.
- Kye 8y agoI'm glad every scifi movie and TV show's sound designers decide to ignore reality and make it interesting. It wouldn't be the same without the whoosh and rumble.
- PhasmaFelis 8y agoI feel like a space battle that cuts back and forth between tense, Red October-style bridge scenes, and ships exploding in fire and chaos and absolute silence, would be pretty awesome.
- saalweachter 8y agoThat's actually pretty common in modern scifi. Mind you, I can't name one I'm certain of off the top of my head, but a lot of people like to get space explosions "right".
- starpilot 8y agoYou can build one at home! https://rimstar.org/sdprop/lifter/lifter1b/lifter1b.htm https://rimstar.org/sdprop/lifter/lifter1b/lifter1b.htm
- nomel 8y agoIt’s not as easy to get ahold of >20kV power supplies these days! Before, you could find them on the street corners and in your neighbors trash. There was always a CRT to sacrifice. My lifter, probably like most, eventually caught fire. Efficiency seems fairly poor [1], and from my experience, ozone is absolutely a problem. 1. https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.4890353 https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.4890353
- Groxx 8y agoMicrowave transformer maybe? Or does that not supply enough?
- FreeFull 8y agoIdeally, for safety reasons, you'd use something like a neon transformer. They supply a very high voltage, but at the same time the output is current-limited, which decreases the chance you'll electrocute yourself.
- mcguire 8y agoLimited upside; high chance of self-immolation. I'm in.
- snuxoll 8y agoEven a 10” neon tube needs enough amperage to cause a fatal electric shock.
- LinuxBender 8y agoI've zapped myself on one of those. It contracted my muscles enough to send me across the room and almost knocked me out. I'm happy it wasn't across the chest. And yes, I was doing something incredibly dumb. My teen-age years had some regrettable moments.
- bluejekyll 8y ago“It was very exciting,” Barrett says. “Then it crashed into the wall, which wasn’t ideal.”
- SargeZT 8y agoBasically a summary of my entire professional life.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- balabaster 8y agoHahaha mine too :'D
- freyir 8y agoIt feels like HN became Reddit overnight. We had a good run.
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- agumonkey 8y ago"we have the technology, we can rebuild him"
- SargeZT 8y agoLeave me broken and just give me the six million.
- stcredzero 8y agoLots of people in the robotics field might be making such an observation. Hopefully, this won't also apply to many production self driving vehicles.
- boxcardavin 8y agoAwesome result, hopefully we'll see a video of it in action and more information of thrust to power ratio. Very cool.
- skinofstars 8y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boB6qu5dcCw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boB6qu5dcCw
- superkuh 8y agoThis is absurd and scientific american sure has taken a fall from grace in order to believe it. Electrostatic "lifters" have been around for half a century. They are toys. They do not scale up. They cannot even lift themselves as their power supply or energy storage has to be on the ground with tiny wires going up to the lifter. There is absolutely no chance this can be called a 'plane'. It always has to be tethered with wire to deliver the power. They were really popular with the UFO/Free energy crackpot crowds back in the late 90s and early 2000s.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- upofadown 8y agoWell this particular plane runs off a battery...
- saidajigumi 8y agoAnd from TFA (sadly, the paper in Nature is referred to, but not properly cited) a main innovation is the development of a system that provides the required 40,000 volts from a battery in a form-factor amenable to small aircraft (think drone) usage.
- Varcht 8y agoWill make being a baggage handler pretty exciting.
- superkuh 8y agoDoes it? As far as I can tell it doesn't exist outside of the person's mind. Having played around with lifters myself using balsa, al foil, and a rectified neon sign transformer I just don't think the physics can work out. And there's no physical plane photos or videos to support otherwise. Until then I'm sticking with this being absurd. That said, ionization does have it's place in aircraft in terms of controlling attachment or detachment of turbulent airflow over wings. It can significantly improve fuel consumption by reducing drag. But it is not a viable propulsion source. At least not on Earth for things larger than a meter or so.
- dirtbikesRcool 8y agoSo no video?
- peetle 8y agoVideo or it didn't happen.
- anakanemison 8y agoHere is the video, fwiw. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boB6qu5dcCw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boB6qu5dcCw
- joenathanone 8y agoLink with time code https://youtu.be/boB6qu5dcCw?t=132 https://youtu.be/boB6qu5dcCw?t=132
- Varcht 8y agoGreatest since the Wright bro's, sure...
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- jstanley 8y agoIt is hard to convince oneself that this is substantially different from a glider.
- walrus01 8y agoNeither is a human powered ultra light weight, huge aircraft like the gossamer albatross. If you have a very weak engine it needs to be made out of incredibly light materials, and even so light it must be flown indoors with zero wind.
- superkuh 8y agoI didn't happen. Look at the video they link. All the forward momentum and lift comes from the launch rail. It simply glides to the ground after that.
- 8y ago
- mchannon 8y agoAs planes use most of their energy to not crash into the ground, I could see the most practical use of this technology for propulsion where crashing isn't a major concern. Airships (dirigibles/blimps), and to a lesser extent, sea and land vehicles.
- isostatic 8y ago> I could see the most practical use of this technology for propulsion where crashing isn't a major concern. Missiles jumped to mind. That's their whole purpose.
- cal5k 8y ago"We've fired the missiles, sir" "Excellent... when do they hit?" "According to our calculations... ohhh about 6 weeks from now"
- isostatic 8y agoRevenge is a dish best served cold. I was thinking how Musk could do that. Launch some tungstan rods into a highly eliptical orbit, small thruster + control pack on them to adjust their orbit when required. When it's out at say 300,000k+ fire the engine for a few seconds, adjusting the orbit so it will crash into the chosen target a few days from now. The high apogee means not a lot of power to change orbit to collision, and almost impossible to detect. It would likely appear to be an asteroid hit.
- thrill 8y agoThat would certainly raise the level of Bitcoin blackmail.
- patrickg_zill 8y agoIt's rumored that the US military has a "Rod of God" satellite. No way to confirm its existence of course.
- 8y ago
- mamon 8y agoI guess in this case ions ARE the moving parts :)
- alantrrs 8y agoThis is a very exciting line of research. Assuming this gets to be a real plane or drone. How do you deal with the Ozone it produces?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- nraynaud 8y agoI don’t think you can move a lot of air silently, the turbulent layer between the flow and the still air produces noise. This is only silent because of size. Maybe less noisy than a fan or prop, but not silent.
- onemoresoop 8y agocorrent, but it would still be "silent-er"
- grondilu 8y agoBirds can be fairly silent.
- gji 8y agoNature letter here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0707-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0707-9 Looks like they developed advancements with lightweight high-voltage converters and performance of the thrusters.
- kgilpin 8y agoFlapping wings are also silent. And articulated wings can perform complex maneuvering including hover and vertical takeoff and landing. So is there any other advantage to ion propulsion besides quiet operation?
- PhasmaFelis 8y agoLow fueling (charging) costs would be huge if they could scale it up to passenger size. It sounds like they probably can't, but even a hybrid jet/ion plane that use substantially less jet fuel could be a game-changer. (Also, the fact that it can be outperformed by a sparrow is only relevant if we can build a reliable, efficient artificial sparrow, which AFAIK we absolutely can't.)
- darkmighty 8y agoThis technology is inherently less efficient unfortunately, because the ion velocity is very high. The thrust-to-energy ratio goes to 0 as exhaust velocity increases: mv/mv^2 ~ 1/v You could lower ion energy by lowering the voltage, but then the thrust-to-weight is going to be prohibitively low (and at one point you won't be able to ionize air anymore?). High efficiency flight means either wings or slow moving propellers (and aircraft itself preferably). You'd need to look no further than a glider to fullfil the potential claimed here. Overall flapping wings are probably superior though, since they allow vertical takeoff and high manueverability; but they're much harder to develop and maintain.
- ceejayoz 8y ago"No moving parts" sounds like a really big deal for long-mission drones.
- superkuh 8y agoNot at 6.25 N kW^−1 it's not.
- givinguflac 8y agoThis would be a great addition to hot air balloons for mild navigation.
- mgpetkov 8y agoBut what would happen if the electrodes become wet like flying in rain, fog and so on?
- ceejayoz 8y agoSounds like it'd be perfect for exploring Mars.
- mkl 8y agoMars's atmosphere is probably much too thin - not many atoms to ionise and not much lift to be had. Might work at some altitudes on Venus or a gas giant, though.
- rishav_sharan 8y agoTitan. 3 times the atmospheric density of earth. Would be awesome to fly something like this there though i suppose a balloon would probably be much more practical.
- ryanmarsh 8y agoHow much thrust was generated and how much does the craft weigh?
- jchrisa 8y agoPowered by ground based microwaves, it could be simplified into a flying antennae.
- pugworthy 8y agoOddly, this idea has been around since 1964... http://www.rexresearch.com/desev/desev.htm http://www.rexresearch.com/desev/desev.htm
- choot 8y agoA flute also doesn't have any moving parts.
- zackmorris 8y agoHere's the best resource that I know of for building ion wind "lifters": http://jnaudin.free.fr/lifters/main.htm http://jnaudin.free.fr/lifters/main.htm So far their best result is 0.886 kW/kg (0.539 hp/lb), comparable to a helicopter, by using a pulsed DC power supply at 70 Hz: http://jnaudin.free.fr/html/lftphv.htm http://jnaudin.free.fr/html/lftphv.htm So a helicopter with that could lift 1.13 kg/kW (1.86 lb/hp). A plane with a 10:1 lift to drag ratio would fly with 0.0886 kW/Kg (0.0539 hp/lb). It could lift 11.3 kg/kW (18.6 lb/hp). A 200 kg (440 lb) helicopter, including human passenger, would take 177 kW (237 hp). The same mass airplane would take 17.7 kW (23.7 hp). Of course the pulsing would add a buzz which may not be desirable. It looks like the pulsed DC uses 17.72 RMS W vs 69.58 DC W, so is about 3.927 times more efficient than DC. Maybe a plane could have both silent and high efficiency modes for takeoff and cruising. I have no idea how these numbers compare to the ones in the article, but they should be within the same magnitude. Please someone double check my math :-)
- ColanR 8y agoWhen I was young and foolish, I remember running into that same website through UFO conspiracy theory sites. Theory was/is, the ion wind 'lifter' tech was figured out many decades ago and that's how those pesky flying saucers get around.
- lightedman 8y agoWell, kinda, yea. About 25 years ago we had confidential demos from a company I worked for where we made substantially heavier (compared to now) solar cells literally float in the air using self-generated ionic thrust. Problem was, that was all the power you could get, and even then it wasn't enough to keep the cell afloat. Back then, we were using 10%-ish efficiency cells. Where I work now, we just toss 21+% monocrystalline cells which are 1/8th the mass of the originals around and don't care if they break, because as long as you can still put a bus ribbon on them all the way, they will produce full rated power, even if it looks like they were nailed with a sawed-off shotgun on the EL image. “You want to play with 40,000 volts on an aircraft? That technology didn’t exist. Steve [Barrett] found a clever way to get that efficient conversion.” So, the technology existed (when you do PWM with DC it mostly acts like AC so you can run it through a basic transformer) but they figured out the circuitry to make it efficient (nevermind solar efficiency now is enough to do what we want today without the basic transformer tech from almost 20 years ago.) Still neat, but this really hints of amateurs that never checked some basic math which hinted at this possibility, and existed back in the 70s, which was before I was even born. EDIT: added the second half after re-reading, edited again to make the PWM DC statement more clear.
- mrfusion 8y agoHow about using these as solid state wind turbines to generate electricity.
- _Microft 8y agoArs Technica has an article on this as well. It features a 5 minute video of various attempts and sustained flight as well. https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/11/small-drone-soars-on-an-ionic-wind-with-no-moving-parts/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/11/small-drone-soars-on...
- HillaryBriss 8y agopossibly useful for flying contraband over a prison or border wall
- rudolph9 8y agoCould this technology be used to create a wind turbine with no moving parts? I have very little insight into how this would work but it intuitively seems applicable and would probably be way more useful.
- rudolph9 8y agoA quick search says yes! https://repository.tudelft.nl/islandora/object/uuid:81221f03-9d46-4c7c-a5b0-b859a26f7d04?collection=research https://repository.tudelft.nl/islandora/object/uuid:81221f03... This from 2011 Does anyone know if something like this exists at large scales today?
- ta20222 8y agoWhen I submit a link, it doesn't show up. Does HN penalize Tor?
- dang 8y agoSometimes. Your submission got caught by a software filter. I've restored it, but in the future you should email us at hn@ycombinator.com if issues arise. There are too many comments for us to see most of them.
- apo 8y agoVideo here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boB6qu5dcCw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boB6qu5dcCw
- pugworthy 8y agoOthers have pointed this out I think, but this kind of craft concept has been around for a while. Here is a 1964 Popular Mechanics article about the idea... http://www.rexresearch.com/desev/desev.htm http://www.rexresearch.com/desev/desev.htm Different approach to flying but it’s interesting how some of the described reactions are similar about the silence and no moving parts. I remember reading this article when I was a kid in a stack of PMs in the early 70s.
- chris_va 8y ago2012 paper on this subject that is a little more technical on the thrust aspect: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1202.4604.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1202.4604.pdf
- mrfusion 8y agoHas there been any research on running something like this in water? For boat or sub propulsion? Since ions already exist in water maybe you can skip the ionizing step.
- danielmg 8y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetohydrodynamic_drive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetohydrodynamic_drive
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- ceriodamus 8y agoThis man probably got contacted by X amount of countries militaries already. The idea of a totally silent tiny drone that can get real close is scary to think of.
- olgs 8y agoI wonder if it is possible to use this technology to build a noiseless fan.
- heharkon 8y agoSOME moving parts would be nice, like the rudder, ailerons and elevators. Otoh, maybe part of those functionalities could be achieved with differentiating the ion flux.
- ajuc 8y agoYou can also vector the flux with electromagnets.
- kwhitefoot 8y ago> Powers a Plane with No Moving Parts Yet all the pictures are renderings, artist's impressions. So, do they have a working model or not? There are no links to any supporting documents; Scientific American used to be better than this, very disappointing.
- lawlessone 8y agoThere is video of it flying here, no idea why OP article did not include that. https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/11/small-drone-soars-on-an-ionic-wind-with-no-moving-parts/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/11/small-drone-soars-on...
- cmroanirgo 8y ago> “It was very exciting,” Barrett says. “Then it crashed into the wall, which wasn’t ideal.” Reading this reminded me of the two Wright brothers, who had similar issues, and similar people around them, not believing it would work. Kudos. It sounds pretty amazing to me.
- rkagerer 8y agoI gather this thing ionizes air to create a positively charged "working fluid" which accelerates away from the anode in a cone shaped pattern. The working fluid doesn't generate [much(?)] thrust directly, as it collides with the craft again at the cathode. But along the way some of the ions near the edge of the cone bump into and accelerate neutral air molecules, generating the [bulk of the(?)] thrust that propels the craft. With a modified design, is it possible to accelerate the ionized air so fast that all of it vents out the exhaust (e.g. using magnets)? Would that result in higher efficiency / higher thrust? Are there already atmosphere-breathing engines that do this and what are they called?
- ArtifTh 8y ago>Are there already atmosphere-breathing engines that do this and what are they called? Generally this kind of engine is called Magnetohydrodynamic drive. I'm not sure about atmospheric engines, but according to wiki[1] there are prototypes that uses water as working fluid. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetohydrodynamic_drive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetohydrodynamic_drive
- perlgeek 8y ago> When that happens, the nitrogen atoms turn into positively charged ions. Does that mean it produces nitrogen oxide as exhaust? If yes, how long does that live? If such planes were to be scaled up, that could be a potential hazard to be aware of.