New Test Suggests NASA's "Impossible" EM Drive Will Work In Space

originally posted by: graysquirrel
a reply to: stormbringer1701

One kilowatt per newton is awfully impressively high. Are you sure that is the right ratio?

i think so. either for one of the EM devices or the QVPT. Since these things are interrelated and that is the projected power for at least one of them then yes. as a matter of fact the i think it is the NASA replication of the Shawyer device. projected based on the effect so far with about 100ish or so watts producing around 100 micronewtons.

EDIT: WE will probably be more certain in July with the tests on an improved test article which should start then. Their taking the Shawyer device super-saiyan. (which means a superconducting test article and increased input power.) things are always better when you add super conductors to it. Maybe some blue glowey stuff involved. I love blue glowey stuff.

a reply to: stormbringer1701

100 watts per 100 micro-newtons is one kilowatt per one mili-newton or 1/1000 of a newton. Still good considering.

If they reduce the losses of the resonate cavity, then they very well could get a full newton or more.

originally posted by: graysquirrel
a reply to: stormbringer1701

100 watts per 100 micro-newtons is one kilowatt per one mili-newton or 1/1000 of a newton. Still good considering.

If they reduce the losses of the resonate cavity, then they very well could get a full newton or more.

the chinese and shaywer and one other fellow (italian but the name escapes me at the moment) all report far better results than the NASA replication effort so far. The july tests are NASA's attempt to "catch up" to the others. i think the chinese report over a newton.

what i imagine happening is that someone will try to reduce the dimensions of the resonant cavity and increasing the driver frequency to compensate. Thus instead of one propulsion unit you will have hundreds or thousands. potentially throughout the hull. the limitation would be approaching x ray or gamma ray frequency these heat and potentially melt the cavity walls and are dangerous to life. also the minimum dimension is dependent on resonant modes which require the wave form to exist for a certain minimum length/width before rebounding back.

originally posted by: graysquirrel
a reply to: stormbringer1701

100 watts per 100 micro-newtons is one kilowatt per one mili-newton or 1/1000 of a newton. Still good considering.

If they reduce the losses of the resonate cavity, then they very well could get a full newton or more.

I'm so sorry. i had it wrong. It was the Chinese replication of Shawyer that got one run with 1 newton per kilowatt. The eagle works guys have talked about scaling up to at least that though based on linear projections of their own data. And the error in units above is entirely my own and not their's.

" I know that's a mighty big leap from the 1.0uN/Watt we currently have demonstrated at the Eagleworks Lab"

refers to the measured force in a vacuum per input electric power at NASA Eagleworks. The highest measured force per input power was 1 Newton/kiloWatt for the experiments by Prof. Yang in China with a non-superconducting truncated cone EM Drive and by Cannae LLC in the USA for their superconducting EM Drive shaped like a pillbox.

current state of things: the recent media attention resulted in an influx of new participants at the NSF advanced Topic EM threads. many are refighting old battles WRT spurious signal sources. other necomers are flat out just gainsaying everything (somewhat beligerently) without spelling out specific objections. it got chaotic for a few days and is only now settling down. The resulting chaos of the new arrivals has resulted in an effort to build a FAQ and or wiki addressing and organizing the points, discoveries and objections that are being swamped in the active threads. this should keep the repetitive arguments of the latest and future batch of true defenders of the faith of orthodoxy and paladins of standard physics from causing so much noise in the future.

The independent replication teams are either planning, in mid construction or in actual test runs. there are at least 4 separate replication projects on going though these are all private efforts from individuals working on their own initiative. Also several of the newcomers are vowing to try "replications" though some of these will be considerably different in the form of the test articles and testing protocols, measuring equipment and ancilliary stuff.

Meanwhile the Eagle Works team is building EM device 2.0 and projecting first test runs of the improved EM device in july. presumably the NASA/Johnson head shed extended their deadline so they can work toward actual peer replication at GRC.

Additionally someone has contact with Shawyer and he is providing additional information about things in his own experiments including the Boeing Phantom Works work and cessation of work. Also details of his superconducting rig. potentially enough to replicate that. so now we have indirect email and social media communications with Shawyer.

More information has trickled in from scrutinizing existing papers and articles about the chinese work and the cannae work though this new information is still pretty sparse. it mostly just organizing the information so that not one scrap of available information is overlooked.

um you guys need to see this:

nextbigfuture.com...

1250 newtons. thats a lot of figs.

originally posted by: stormbringer1701
um you guys need to see this:

nextbigfuture.com...

1250 newtons. thats a lot of figs.

Quite an interesting read.
Tho I will remain skeptical until I sees a working prototype video of sorts

a reply to: stormbringer1701

Current state of things: still far from conclusive. Could well be human/instrument error. Best not to get too invested in the idea just yet.

originally posted by: GetHyped
a reply to: stormbringer1701

Current state of things: still far from conclusive. Could well be human/instrument error. Best not to get too invested in the idea just yet.

that is a dichtomy to me. on the one hand if i knew nothing at all about the extent of the situation, the history and the data as it were, then it would make perfect sense to say that. but that would be a blind statement. i am not blind.

From my perspective though there still is the chance it is all an error it is a lot less likely than one would suppose blindly. What is probably safe to say about it is someone's feelings are going to be hurt because there are multiple theories of what is actually causing the observed effects. For a group of devices that share a general design there can only be one true theory at the root of it.

star for you anyway because i do understand where you are coming from. and it is a rational position.

originally posted by: Phage
a reply to: Deran

That's a more clear explanation, thanks.
Has such a phenomena been observed? How does it apply to the experiments being discussed?

I would be surprised if it has been directly observed, since accurate gravitational measurements are somewhat beyond our current capabilities. This is because gravity is the weakest of all fundamental forces, and only becomes relevant at very large scales and energy densities.

It is, however, a necessity for consistency that nature works this way. Since energy can change form, such as kinetic energy being converted into mass in a particle collider, or nuclear binding energy being released in a nuclear reaction, it would cause a lot of trouble if some forms of energy did not influence or feel gravity. You could build perpetual motion machines, for example (in theory).

It really boils down to good old E=mc^2. All forms of energy is equivalent to mass.

The electromagnetic fields inside the EM-drive has some (complicated and incredibly weak) effect on space-time, and it has been proposed that this might be what is causing the thrust (if there even is any thrust, that is).

originally posted by: graysquirrel
a reply to: Deran

There is a lot of information about this on the web, but I don't know of any particular sites that explain it well. It's all there on wikipedia though (Stress-energy tensor), if you care to read through it. Best option is probably to buy a good book on the subject (Schutz - "A first course in general relativity" is good), but in any case you need a lot of prior knowledge if you want to understand it in detail.

there is a type of gravity being discussed that has to do with photons being slowed down on the small end of the frustrum compared to the big end. It's a relativity thing. but you have to understand that the NSF thread participants are a big group and there are a lot of ideas being thrown around about what is going on.

because of the sensationalist media coverage that resulted from media reading the NSF thread (which is where a lot of the news story information was gleaned from) Mr March may have been forbidden from discussing the research in any public forums. if so we have just lost our direct information feed from eagle works.

I certainly hope this isn't true.

a reply to: ScreenBogey
This is the sort of news that keeps me alive lol.

update the prepublication paper that Mr March hinted about has now been published. you can download the whole pdf for free here:

www.scirp.org...

On a somewhat related note here is an interview with Dr Heidi Fearn who works with Dr Woodward on a related subject the Mach Effect Thruster: archived.thespaceshow.com...

the first bit is a NASA interview about the orion capsule and CST-100 capsule certification process.

and then there is this: www.science20.com...

propellantless motion in empty space.

a reply to: stormbringer1701

Sure, all you have to do is figure out how to maneuver in four dimensions.

The Scientific American paper describes a simple analogy to our astronaut swimmer in four dimensional spacetime that involves fewer dimensions and can easily be visualized.

www.science20.com...

originally posted by: stormbringer1701
On a somewhat related note here is an interview with Dr Heidi Fearn who works with Dr Woodward on a related subject the Mach Effect Thruster: archived.thespaceshow.com...

the first bit is a NASA interview about the orion capsule and CST-100 capsule certification process.

Have they progressed beyond micronewtons of thrust?