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MIT engineers fly first-ever plane with no moving parts (2018)
- culanuchachamim 4y agoHow much energy it needs to fly vs energy needed by propelled plane?
- NiceWayToDoIT 4y ago25 years ago there was a site Kely Net or something similar, also I think there is JLN labs that is still alive, there was lot of over-unity things, BS and scams, but I distinctively remember few of the technologies back then that now popping up as mainstream wonder ... Aluminium oxide engine, brown gas, mighty engine, ion lifter, metal latices fusion ... it is kind of odd how long we need to start exploring new tech.
- worik 4y agoThis is awesome. I am disappointed at the "MIT are boasting, nothing really to show" comments here. This is not Earth shattering. But it is an achievement worthy of our respect. This vehicle is self contained, has no external power supply, unlike all the other examples quoted. I am very impressed
- smusamashah 4y agoCould they have used a Solid State Piezoelectric Fan instead? [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rn6qVv9HzHc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rn6qVv9HzHc
- AnimalMuppet 4y agoThat might be pushing the boundaries of "no moving parts".
- thepasswordis 4y agoI think a lot of the comments in here are basically just annoyed. Kids and nerds were building stuff like this as science fair projects for years. Mythbusters even made one of these on their TV show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCiU96rJJoo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCiU96rJJoo
- ctack 4y agoWonder if this would get loud if scaled up. Massive volume of air moving very quickly over the wings is going to get loud with large enough scale.
- Markoff 4y agoseems like no video of taking off by itself, they seem to have some catapult/string to take off, so if it can't take off it's not really a plane, just glider
- ajoseps 4y agothis news is from 2018
- makeworld 4y ago(2018)
- c0n5pir4cy 4y agoOlder news as other people have mentioned, if you want to see how it works and see it flying here is a YouTube link: https://youtu.be/boB6qu5dcCw?t=85 https://youtu.be/boB6qu5dcCw?t=85
- nico 4y agoThat video is 3 years old. Do you know if there’s anything new with this project/technology?
- dr_dshiv 4y agoHere’s the latest: https://newatlas.com/drones/ion-propulsion-drone/ https://newatlas.com/drones/ion-propulsion-drone/
- memco 4y agoInteresting to see the development over the past few years and how theory is comparing to practice. One of the theorized benefits from the MIT video was quieter drones. This article says the ionic propulsion demoed is about 85db which sounds like it’s just as loud as current drones.
- bentcorner 4y agoFrom that page here's a video of their ionic drone: https://youtu.be/iihprC5Huf4 https://youtu.be/iihprC5Huf4 Interesting that it sounds pretty much like a regular drone.
- hahamrfunnyguy 4y agoThat thing is still pretty noisy! It looks like it's pushing the ionized air through some kind of jet?
- jdlshore 4y agoAre you sure that's the same group? The design is completely different and it appears to be a company based in Florida.
- nashashmi 4y agoIonizing the air? Couldn't that be used for hypersonic flight to eliminate air friction plus eliminate sonic boom?
- mrfusion 4y agoIt could be a new type of scram jet, right? A normal jet engine has to slow down supersonic air to subsonic to combust it which is inefficient.
- gorjusborg 4y agoIs the viscosity of ionized air lower than air? My understanding is that the ionized air is used in tandem with electric field to accelerate plain air (non-ionized) by collision/friction. In other words, the ionized air is being used as a gaseous propeller.
- nomel 4y agoI thought about doing this when I was playing with lifters a couple decades ago. The idea was that you could ionize the boundary layer, to make it somewhat "self repulsive", to thin it, to try to reduce the skin friction drag [1]. I remember doing some napkin math, and the added weight/power would be a net loss. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_friction_drag https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_friction_drag
- mrfusion 4y agoI believe people have found ways to reduce drag with lasers and microwaves so you might be on to something.
- jameshart 4y agoAccelerating the ‘plain air’ isn’t really necessary to the propulsion. Once you’ve accelerated the ions you’ve already accomplished a momentum transfer - if those ions then go and share that momentum with some non ionized air molecules that’s their own business. I guess maybe the non ionized air acts to keep the ions around between the two charged grids for longer, which means that for each ion you create you can maybe exploit its attractive/repulsive force for longer?
- adolph 4y agoUnlike turbine-powered planes, the aircraft does not depend on fossil fuels to fly. And unlike propeller-driven drones, the new design is completely silent. I suspect that the design is silent due to its low power and that something with enough thrust to perform some useful task would be louder even if the noise is that of wind only.
- dr_dshiv 4y agoIndeed, at a larger scale it is loud: https://newatlas.com/drones/ion-propulsion-drone/ https://newatlas.com/drones/ion-propulsion-drone/
- tqkxzugoaupvwqr 4y agoIt’s extremely loud, something I didn’t expect, and sounds very much like a high speed fan. Together with the black box it made me suspicious if we aren’t being deceived. Two comments under the article think the same.
- JKCalhoun 4y agoYeah, lot to be skeptical of here.
- judge2020 4y agoThis was done in 50's and 60's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion-propelled_aircraft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion-propelled_aircraft > The use of EHD propulsion for lift was studied by American aircraft designer Major Alexander Prokofieff de Seversky in the 1950s and 1960s. He filed a patent for an "ionocraft" in 1959. He built and flew a model VTOL ionocraft capable of sideways manoeuvring by varying the voltages applied in different areas, although the heavy power supply remained external.
- danielmorozoff 4y agoThis is exactly right, when I was in grad school we also explored new ionization designs to reduce the voltage requirements to achieve this. In our explorations, biggest problems were weight and voltage issues. Very cool to see though, you can make this at home with a very basic high voltage generator and a set of needles. Here's another design for DIY: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGq7LfjDyZM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGq7LfjDyZM
- beanjuice 4y agoHeres an old video of one such example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GijJmIz1G7U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GijJmIz1G7U
- samizdis 4y agoWow. Seversky was the guy advocating for long-range air power in WWII. He wrote Victory Through Air Power, which inspired Disney to finance an animated film on the subject out of his own pocket. Seversky appears in person in the film to introduce some concepts. The film is just amazing. It was available as part of a Disney DVD compilation quite a few years ago (Disney in the Trenches? [edit to correct title of box set: it was "Walt Disney Treasures - On the Front Lines"]). The standalone film is on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/VictoryThroughAirPower https://archive.org/details/VictoryThroughAirPower Edit to add: Here's the Wikipedia page about Victory Through Air Power https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_Through_Air_Power https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_Through_Air_Power From the page: Filmmaker Walt Disney read the book, and felt that its message was so important that he would personally finance a partly-animated short, also called Victory Through Air Power, which was released in July 1943.[3] Disney's purpose for creating the film was to promote Seversky's theories to government officials and the public. After seeing the film, Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt decided that Seversky knew what he was talking about, changing the course of the war.
- pen2l 4y agoI like the video in the article quite a lot! The gentleman speaking in it is one of the scientists working on the project, and manages to convey an excitement and basic idea that the layman can kind of understand, as well as some fun history. Wish more articles could have this kind of interviews!
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- anonymousiam 4y agoThese were popular decades ago, and were the focus of many an argument over the basis in theory of how they worked. Many did not understand that they depend on atmosphere to operate. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzZy1Aqleno https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzZy1Aqleno
- moron4hire 4y agoOh man, I was just coming here to say that. I seem to remember first hearing about these "lifters" in highschool, so that would have been late 1990s. But that recollection is based solely on remembering the dumb friend I had who thought it would be a good idea to try to make one, not knowing anything about high voltage electricity. Luckily, we were also too distracted by video games to go dumpster diving for a CRT or microwave transformer.
- dr_dshiv 4y agoI’ve been curious about using high heat combustion plus RF to create denser plasmas (ionized air) plus pulsed magnets to push the air. It seems impossible for earthly flight, but maybe with lightweight super conductors. I’ve also been curious about using very large-area weak ionizers for future zeppelins. Plasma propulsion has been used for zeppelin flight at a small scale. Plasmas are also used for flow control on wings and propellers. There doesn’t seem to be much unclassified research in the area, though.
- dr_orpheus 4y agoNothing earthbound that I know of, but it sounds like you are describing something similar to the electric propulsion thrusters that PhaseFour makes: https://phasefour.io/rf-thruster/ https://phasefour.io/rf-thruster/
- baltimore 4y agoCan this tech be used to make a (quieter) room fan?
- learn_more 4y agoYes. Sharper Image sold one called the "Ionic Breeze". They generate ozone, which is a problem however. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_ioniser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_ioniser
- mleonhard 4y agoOzone burns everything it touches. It smells nice while it destroys cells in your nose, throat, and lungs. Ozone-producing consumer devices are banned in California. They are legal to sell in other places because of the negligence of regulators.
- ohhhhhh 4y agoFirst thing when i saw this. Would these airplanes just be flying cancer sprayers? lol
- ctack 4y agoAt least ozone is less dense than air, it'd rise and eventually even bolster the ozone layer which sounds like a win.
- amelius 4y agoDoes this produce ozone?
- peter303 4y agoHow does the efficiency of ion-drive compared to electric motors?
- CSSer 4y agoI tried to find a more precise answer but technically an ion-drive is an electric motor, so I'm guessing it's comparable. The thing is that based on the couple demos I watched the flight seems really erratic. It makes me wonder if the fuel supply is somewhat inconsistent i.e. air turbulence makes the actual theoretical energy efficiency moot.
- justusthane 4y agoI'm having trouble understanding why it would necessarily be comparable to a traditional electric motor in efficiency. Whether or not it's "technically" an electric motor, it's operating on completely different principles. The first things that come to mind are there are no moving parts to generate friction and heat, and it requires much higher voltage. Wouldn't those aspects alone swing the efficiency one way or the other?
- brianpan 4y agoBoth use electromagnetic force to move something. They are much more similar to each other than combustion, which is a chemical reaction. https://electronics.howstuffworks.com/brushless-motor.htm https://electronics.howstuffworks.com/brushless-motor.htm
- CSSer 4y agoIt was a big guess for sure. To be clear, I don't know. I did find this in my search, which suggests it's not exponential[0], so it seems you're correct. There's a drop-off at higher exhaust speeds, but it's unclear to me why that is. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_thruster#Energy_efficiency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_thruster#Energy_efficiency
- IIAOPSW 4y ago
- jonplackett 4y agoOk but does it make enough lift for a flying saucer
- exhilaration 4y agoApparently, yes! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iihprC5Huf4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iihprC5Huf4
- jonplackett 4y agoAwesome!
- marginalia_nu 4y agoI can show MIT how to fold a sheet of paper to make a plane with no moving parts.
- xnorswap 4y agoThat's a very "just used a pencil" type punchline.
- Dylan16807 4y agoI'd say a glider is more like having the words pre-printed on the paper. Most of the elements of writing are there, but in the wrong way.
- beanjuice 4y agoThere is a comment from Pubpeer [0] on this research [1] if anyone is curious: "This is not the first flight of an ion-drive aircraft. Seversky was patenting and flying ionocraft in the 1960s [2], hobbyists have been building them for decades under the name "lifter", and a self-contained device that carries its own power supply was developed by Ethan Krauss in 2006. MIT's device may be the first ionocraft to use wings for lift, however. The previous devices behaved more like helicopters than airplanes, and did not need wings to stay aloft." [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0707-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0707-9 [1] https://pubpeer.com/publications/020C19C112F2605CEC4B34CA320AAC https://pubpeer.com/publications/020C19C112F2605CEC4B34CA320... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GijJmIz1G7U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GijJmIz1G7U
- belter 4y ago"On the performance of electrohydrodynamic propulsion" [2013]: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rspa.2012.0623 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rspa.2012... A reference mentioned in the Nature article [0] above, has a good overview of the Mathematics. It also mentions a UK patent from 1928 I did not see mentioned from the MIT Nature article: "Brown TT. 1928 A method of and an apparatus or machine for producing force or motion. UK Patent no. GB300311 (A)." : https://patents.google.com/patent/GB300311A/en https://patents.google.com/patent/GB300311A/en
- CSSer 4y agoSo is this just MIT being MIT (overhyping everything) or did this guy and his team somehow miss all of this? Is our scientific knowledge really that scattered?
- portyllo 4y agoThis made it to the cover of Nature with a similar headline [0]. I guess that they are also "overhyping everything". [0] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DsmahXYXoAAkaoI?format=jpg&name=large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DsmahXYXoAAkaoI?format=jpg&name=...
- joshgroban 4y ago
- tom-thistime 4y agoOk, one moving part.
- stym06 4y agoIt's a 2018 piece.
- djtriptych 4y agoI've been birding over the pandemic and learning about how they fly. Watching them, it starts to become clear just how skilled and efficient they are. This tech demo is amazing, but my mind immediately compares it to things like the ruby-throated hummingbird migration, in which a 5 gram bird[0] flies 500+ MILES nonstop over open water, on maybe 2 grams of fat storage. Then they feed by hovering so accurately that they can reliably thread a 1/8" beak into a moving 1/4" target. They can do this directly into 20 mph headwinds [0]. Also in rainstorms where they are constantly getting pelted with their bodyweight in wet missiles every few seconds. They can also fly 30mph in level flight, which in body lengths / second is ~4x times faster than an SR-71. [0] US nickels weigh 5 grams, for comparison. [1] https://www.kqed.org/science/28759/what-happens-when-you-put-a-hummingbird-in-a-wind-tunnel https://www.kqed.org/science/28759/what-happens-when-you-put...
- xg15 4y ago> Then they feed by hovering so accurately that they can reliably thread a 1/8" beak into a moving 1/4" target. They can do this directly into 20 mph headwinds [0]. Also in rainstorms where they are constantly getting pelted with their bodyweight in wet missiles every few seconds. What I find amazing is that chickens appear to possess a sort of natural optical stabilizer - which will keep their heads still even when the rest of their body is moved. [1] If this is a regular feature of bird anatomy, it would explain how a lot of their precision during flight is archived. At least this made it click for me how an eagle is likely able to keep track of some tiny rodent hundreds of meters below it while hovering in mid-air and bracing against wind, turbulences, etc. I suspect we have the same mechanism, but only applied to the eyeballs, not the whole head. [1] https://youtu.be/Rgy-CbrUNkw https://youtu.be/Rgy-CbrUNkw
- samvher 4y agoYou might enjoy this book: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/simple-science-flight-revised-and-expanded-edition https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/simple-science-flight-revised... (I did, a lot.)
- djtriptych 4y ago
- make3 4y agothe video is really not convincing lol, it doesn't look like it's doing much more than gliding from the initial launch force, which is due to an external (moving) force. EDIT: ok this one is more convincing https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iihprC5Huf4 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iihprC5Huf4
- thehappypm 4y agoThe first video shows unpowered, just a little glide. Second shows how it goes way further when powered
- make3 4y agocouldn't see those on my phone. Wish I could delete my comment.
- jacquesm 4y agoI'm not buying that, that whine sounds just like a ducted fan and there is a giant hole in the support base just where the ducted fan needs to blow the air to avoid having that air pushed sideways, if the lift was generated by the ionized air it would be nearly silent.
- okasaki 4y agoPresumably there are moving parts involved, they are just too small to see.
- jdlshore 4y agoIt operates by using a high voltage to strip electrons from nitrogen atoms, then the opposite current to attract those ions to the front surface of a wing. The movement of the ions causes the air to move, which generates lift over the wing. So no, there's no moving parts involved in generating the lift.
- strongpigeon 4y agoI think GP was making a joke that the ions are the moving part.
- zrkrlc 4y agoI've been seeing 'GP' 'round these parts for a while now. What does it stand for? Grandparent?
- IIAOPSW 4y agoI've been assuming it means "general poster" (in contrast to OP which means "original poster"). Could also be "grandparent" (in the context of the comment hierarchy of "parent"). In any case, regardless of the specific abbreviation intended, the meaning is pretty clear from context. GP (noun): the author of a previous comment which is the topic of the current comment. "the GP wasn't sure about the terminology until IIAOPSW came in and cleared it up."
- dwighttk 4y agoHope it doesn’t crash into anything
- nixpulvis 4y agoWould a paper airplane in a tornado (or nice thermal) count?
- jacquesm 4y agoYou can 'fly' semis in tornados, so no. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WABqwKjQM_c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WABqwKjQM_c
- thehappypm 4y agoDoes this work because of the mass difference between electrons and protons? If you separate an electron from an atom, charge is conserved, mass in conserved. Apply an electric field, then you shoot the ion one way and the electron the other. The heavy ion then acts like propellant. Mass still conserved, charge still conserved. At some point the electron is absorbed into some random ion elsewhere and the ion grabs an electron from elsewhere.
- api_or_ipa 4y agoSounds cool, but the headline is pretty bait-y. First, the aircraft has no control surfaces, so it's limited to flying in a straight line. So the headline should read "MIT engineers fly first-ever plane with no moving parts in propulsion". And then, even that's not true, since ramjets[0] have been a thing for a long time. 0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramjet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramjet
- nharada 4y agoCould you yaw the plane by changing the power on one side?
- randrews 4y agoThank you! When I read the headline I wasn't even thinking of propulsion: gliders have no moving parts for propulsion, neither do solid rocket engines, so what? What I wanted to know was how on earth they made something to do the job of an aileron without moving to affect the airflow... And I was disappointed to find out that they didn't. "No moving parts" is a dumb way to advertise this. It's a cool thing, an self-propelled ionic propulsion system, but the fact it has no moving parts isn't an especially interesting feature of it.
- pvaldes 4y agoInteresting. I wonder if this stuff would attract lightning
- anonu 4y agoArticle from 2018 - how has the progress on this tech been over the last 4 years? CUrious whether the physics can support much larger payloads.
- WalterBright 4y agoI bet I could make an airplane to fly 60 meters with no moving parts using a solid fuel rocket motor. Just take a glider and attach an Estes engine!