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The noise from engines isn't from their combustion or their moving parts. It's from the massive air flow they cause. Ionic engines aren't going to be much quiet
by mlindner 4y ago
The noise from engines isn't from their combustion or their moving parts. It's from the massive air flow they cause. Ionic engines aren't going to be much quieter for aircraft, assuming they're even possible to move that much air.
Also air breathing ionic propulsion kind of depends on the external presence of ions, which requires space conditions, not normal atmospheric conditions.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- lazide 4y agoEh, kinda. While most noise from a jet engine at the ground comes from the shear forces from the fast moving compressed exhaust stream interacting with slow moving surrounding air, the engine itself isn’t quiet. Even in situations where you don’t get that exhaust stream, (such as helicopter turbines spinning up with the clutch out), they’re very loud. Hearing protection required loud. And very little of a rotary planes noise is coming from airflow or from the prop directly, most of it is coming from the engine itself. At best at least half. Presumably an ionic drive couldn’t create the pressure differential levels of a jet engine, or probably even a prop, so they’d have relative large, relatively slow moving masses of air to work. So noise should be a lot lower from that, and also from lack of a internal combustion or turbine engine screaming it’s hardest.