I read recently about an airplane that is powered by ion flow which apparently creates a forward thrust airflow which creates lift in the wings.
https://www.unilad.co.uk/technology/scientists-have-created-a-plane-that-flies-using-ion-thrusters-and-no-fuel/
No moving parts involved, no fuel, no propeller, no engine.
It is fueled by ions pulled from nitrogen in air .
This technology is confusing to me as I am a non-scientist. Although I am 5 I have the intellectual prowess of a 12 year old.
Is this thrust generation analogous to those old Sharper Image Ionic Breeze air filters which created a small air flow without any moving parts?
And I assume although there is no fuel there must be A battery or solar cell to create electric current?
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In order for a plane to stay afloat, you need lift. This generated when you have air (or any gas, but let’s stick wity air) moving over a wing. How that works is pretty well known nowadays. It doesn’t matter to the wing whether it’s the wing that moves through the air, or the air moving over the wing. So if you have a strong enough head wind, it’s possible to have your plane lift off without it moving horizontally.
I’m not sure how conventional airplanes do it, but I think they make the plane move forwards. And so the wings move through the air, generating lift.
In this case, they have a high voltage wire that ionizes the surrounding air. That means an electron gets pulled from nearby nitrogen atoms, making them positively charged. As such, they’ll be repelled by the equally positivzly charged wire. But by having a negatively charged wire behind the positive one, the atoms will move towards that one, and bump into other, neutral atoms/molecules, creating wind. And if, instead of a wire, you have a negatively charged wing, you can generate lift, as discussed previously.
Finally, you will need a battery or other source of electricity in order to generate the high voltages required to make it fly.
My first concern with this design, is that the thrust seems very limted, meaning you won’t get a lot of forward velocity. In the video (which does a great job explaining it, imo), they launch it to give it an initial velocity, but I’m not sure how it holds up in longer flights.
And another issue they’ll run into, which they briefly touch on in the video, is that if you make the voltages too high, you won’t just ionize the air, but create lightning. And -apparently- the higher you go, the lowze that voltage is (for the distance their electrodes are, because the breakdown voltage also depends on distance).
There are moving parts: the ions. Ion engines have no moving parts in the same way an old CRT TV doesn’t have moving parts…the moving parts are just really tiny.
There is fuel; the engine uses electricity, which you can get from batteries (which got the energy from somewhere else) or an onboard generator burning liquid fuel.
There is no propeller but there is propulsion; all propulsion is just momentum transfer. A propeller is a way to change rotary motion in to momentum change in the air. This engine is a way to change electrical potential into momentum change in the air.
There is an engine; it’s the entire setup of electrodes and equipment. It’s just much more highly integrated to the airframe than usual so you don’t see an obvious “pod” hanging off the wing or anything like that.
Don’t get me wrong, this is really clever and cool technology, but it’s not magic. It still has all the normal parts of any aerospace propulsion system, they’re just in weird shapes and locations so it doesn’t look like what we’re used to.
There are batteries, lots of them, to generate thousands of volts difference between electrodes along the wings. It just doesn’t use fossil fuel onboard. Ionizing the air at the front and attracting the charged ions backwards creates a flow of air going to the rear that pushes the plane forwards.
https://news.mit.edu/2018/first-ionic-wind-plane-no-moving-parts-1121
As it comes from MIT and been published in Nature, a prestigious scientific journal, one can presume its kosher.
>No moving parts involved, no fuel, no propeller, no engine.
>It is fueled by ions pulled from nitrogen in air .
Your mistaken there. Ion engine’s naturally use fuel. Namely electricity. And xenon gas in space usually.
Basically, you accelerate ions down a magnetic tube spending electricity, that makes them go very very fast.
Its like any regular jet or rocket engine, throw something out the back = thrust
To answer the part people haven’t answered:
>Is this thrust generation analogous to those old Sharper Image Ionic Breeze air filters which created a small air flow without any moving parts?
Yes, it’s exactly like that.
Airplane works by taking incoming air and sending it out the back with a push. The push makes the plane go forward faster. Or depending on how you angle the plane, the push can also be used to make the plane go upward, against gravity (it helps if you have the correct kind of shape, which is why planes have wings).
Small / older planes burn fuel to run internal combustion engines that spin propellers, basically giant fans, to push the air. Jet planes have highly specialized engines that more directly use the burning fuel to push the air.
The ion thruster uses repulsion of electric charge to push the plane. Basically it works like this:
– Take the incoming nitrogen molecules from the air (air is over 70% nitrogen)
– Make them positively charged
– Let them go in front of a positively charged surface firmly bolted to the plane
– Like charges repel
Basically this achieves pushing air out the back. The only moving parts are electrons.
Ion thrusters are super weak. You’ll note this test was an extremely small, light craft; a very short flight; and nothing on board but the thruster itself. We’ve actually had ion-controlled spacecraft for many years now. Ion thrusters are actually a rare example of a technology that works better in space than on Earth. In space there’s nothing to slow you down, so it doesn’t matter if you take months to gradually build up speed from a very weak but very efficient ion engine that only exerts a few grams of force.
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