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?
In: Technology
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).
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