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Humans depend on fossil fuels as their primary energy source, especially in transportation. However, fossil fuels are both unsustainable and unsafe, serving as the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions and leading to adverse respiratory effects and devastation due to global warming.
A team of researchers at the Institute of Technological Sciences at Wuhan University has demonstrated a prototype device that uses microwave air plasmas for jet propulsion. They describe the engine in the journal AIP Advances, from AIP Publishing.
© Jau Tang and Jun LiA schematic diagram of a prototype microwave air plasma thruster and the images of the bright plasma jet at different microwave powers. This device consists of a microwave power supply, an air compressor, a compressed microwave waveguide and a flame ignitor.
Beyond solid, liquid and gas, plasma is the fourth state of matter, consisting of an aggregate of charged ions. It exists naturally in places like the sun's surface and Earth's lightning, but it can also be generated. The researchers created a plasma jet by compressing air into high pressures and using a microwave to ionize the pressurized air stream.
This method differs from previous attempts to create plasma jet thrusters in one key way. Other plasma jet thrusters, like NASA's Dawn space probe, use xenon plasma, which cannot overcome the friction in Earth's atmosphere, and are therefore not powerful enough for use in air transportation. Instead, the authors' plasma jet thruster generates the high-temperature, high-pressure plasma in situ using only injected air and electricity.
The prototype plasma jet device can lift a 1-kilogram steel ball over a 24-millimeter diameter quartz tube, where the high-pressure air is converted into a plasma jet by passing through a microwave ionization chamber. To scale, the corresponding thrusting pressure is comparable to a commercial airplane jet engine.
By building a large array of these thrusters with high-power microwave sources, the prototype design can be scaled up to a full-sized jet. The authors are working on improving the efficiency of the device toward this goal.
"Our results demonstrated that such a jet engine based on microwave air plasma can be a potentially viable alternative to the conventional fossil fuel jet engine," Tang said.
More Information: "Jet propulsion by microwave air plasma in the atmosphere," is authored by Dan Ye, Jun Li and Jau Tang. The article will appear in AIP Advances on May 5, 2020 (DOI: 10.1063/5.0005814). After that date, it can be accessed at http://aip.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/5.0005814.
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Maybe if you use it in conjunction with a nuclear reactor to provide electricity...
I wonder if that's how the Russians power their new line of cruise missiles; the ones which have unlimited flight times, and which upon their public unveiling, made everybody in the U.S. power structure swallow hard and look their shoes..?
You will be surprised at how soon this technology will be available. They currently have prototypes which could be scaled up to power homes and vehicles.
We are on the verge of an energy revolution and Big Oil will be the loser.
B.C.
Sure it will take time to bring this new tech to market, but it is coming and if you are under 70, in good health and somehow survive this planned destruction of the world economies, you will get to see it.
B.C.