Frictionless Aircraft/Submarines? Is this the next breakthrough in Military Tech?

After reading this article,

www.livescience.com...

I realized that if a single molecule can become frictionless, at some point down the road we could create a device in which many connected molecules could become frictionless.

Frictionless components on the fronts of aircraft and submarines would have a drastic effect on how the plane/subs would perform.

At the dinner table tonight I drove a hot knife through butter and that just made me imagine how much greater it must be when you are doing the same thing in a jet.

While I understand it will be near impossible for an aircraft like to this to exist, I say sit back and wait, our government has to be exploiting this.

Although it would be a massive step to go from one molecule to a working 40 ton fighter aircraft, if it happened aircraft and subs could accelerate to phenomenal speeds. Forget propellers on submarines, they'd be putting rocket engines on and the crew would have to wear g-suits!

That is amazing!!!
Trillions of times a second ? WHA ????

Hmm, the article says that not only can they make the molecules frictionless, but that they observed newton's 3rd law being broken. This is either a major scientific discovery or a load of crap; I'm not really sure which. It made it into the Science magazine, so that suggests there must be something behind this research, which is absolutely fascinating. If you could break newton's 3rd law on a larger scale, the possibilities would be endless. One would be levitation, kind of like some people have reported seeing with ufos.

It's been shown, mathematically at least, that individual atoms travelling inside a perfect carbon nanotube, show no effects of friction. This effect is supposed to be due to the perfect geometry of an interior of a CNT. Nothing to hook or snag to slow it down. I'm not really sure how they can bring this up to the macroscale though.... Newtons Laws are Laws of the Macro realm, things below a certain scale begin to behave ... differently...

[edit on 29-6-2006 by sardion2000]

When we can stabilize these(or similar nanotech) molecules and attach 'em to the skin, submarine races will definitely get intersting. New York to London in 30 minutes underwater anyone?

I've always thought the future submarines would be a nanotech skin that can cause the skin to exert friction opposite the desired direction of travel. You'd be able to move in any direction by telling the skin (through one bad*** computer) which way to exert friction.

I've got the article, and it's very interesting, but it's not going to lead to magic frictionless coatings.

Basically, they hit this molecule with a 33 femtosecond laser pulse to spin it, and the liquid around it reconfigured. It's not that the molecule itself is some sort of ultra-Teflon, the interesting thing is that the surrounding liquid moved away from it. That shouldn't have happened. The questions they're asking are more "what is this new mode of interaction between a solvent and the solutes in it", "what does it take to get that to happen" and "does it happen in nature and we just didn't know it".

OTOH, if you're interested in "coatings" that lower friction, I know they are doing a lot of research in using plasma to prevent boundary layer interactions in airplanes, and the Navy is spending lots o' your tax dollars on trying to figure out something similar for use underwater. With some results, both ways. The magic submarine skin is a standing offer, lots of money in that pot, you're guaranteed some attention if you can pull it off.

Has anybody thought of the obvious? If you have a frictionless submarine or jet, how do you navigate? Some jets may have a vector thrust mechanism of some sort, but flaps, ailerons and rudders wouldn't work, and a submarine wouldn't work either, if the entire surface is frictionless. That is, assuming the research is not a load of bull and that we have not misinterpreted it.

Originally posted by enaught
Has anybody thought of the obvious? If you have a frictionless submarine or jet, how do you navigate? Some jets may have a vector thrust mechanism of some sort, but flaps, ailerons and rudders wouldn't work, and a submarine wouldn't work either, if the entire surface is frictionless. That is, assuming the research is not a load of bull and that we have not misinterpreted it.

My thought would be to make part of the craft have some fricton to navigate, but then you would have to deal with extreme heat and what not, but maybe only a fraction of a second of friction in the right spot at the right time would be all thats needed to initiate a change in direction

Originally posted by enaught
Has anybody thought of the obvious? If you have a frictionless submarine or jet, how do you navigate? Some jets may have a vector thrust mechanism of some sort, but flaps, ailerons and rudders wouldn't work, and a submarine wouldn't work either, if the entire surface is frictionless. That is, assuming the research is not a load of bull and that we have not misinterpreted it.

aaaa, it wouldn't be that hard. On a jet or sub you still have thrust coming out of the same location, all you are doing is making it easier to travel through some amount of space easier. If you want more friction, i.e.. if you want to brake you just lower the temp of nanomaterials. If it was at 8,000 degrees lower it down to 4000 and Im sure you'll get some of the friction back. Just imagine what kind of G's a jet fighter could make if it could control the amount of friction that affected it. A frictionless jet could perform insane possitive(accelerating) and negative(braking) G's.

Think of it like this, with the nanotech application i envision there will be a high friction skin, and when activated, the skin will essentially stay still, propelling the mass. For the leading and trailing edges, frictionless coatings would be ideal, but for surrfaces relatively parallell to the flow, it would be the equivalrmt of a tank track, done in nano. We're probably 50 years awau from this kind of tech (or maybe 50 years after if the governement's been hiding alien tech since the roswell days. It's already possible to build this device in macro, just put a "sharkskin"type material on conveyor belts that run laterally fore and aft on all the surafaces. It'd probably make too much noise and be hevy and complic ated, with frequent maintenance reqiuerd, therefore highly impractical.

When the day coems when we can have a coating controlled by computyer that can turn on, off, and vector the friction (maybe by using friction/frictionless toggle molecules that can be pulsed by computer to send waves of friction over the skin, that'd probably be the most practical system) then you can use vectored friction to accellerate, once up to speed switch to frictionless mode and use small patches of skin for steering and altitude/depth control. To turn left, pulse the skin to friction along the left latetral side, same for other directions.

Back in the late 60's maybe early to mid 70's there was an X plane that used "frictionless wings" in an attempt to create a truly laminar wing. A perforated wing was used, and through a vacuum pump system, the wing's internal pressure was lowered so the boundary layer was sucked into the wing and never allowed to form. With no boundary layer friction was nearly eliminated, for about 30 minutes until the holes state clogging up. The system was too delicate and complicated, impractical for real world apps but they did succeed in significantly reducing friction.

Actually, a lack of friction doesn't matter a hill of beans to a control surface.

Consider a cube of air moving along the wing surface. It encounters an airfoil, let's say an aileron raised above the wing. The cube of air can't very well pass through the aileron, frictionless or no. It can no longer continue on the path it's traversing over the wing either: the airfoil's in the way. It must change direction. In order to do this it must accelerate. Newton's second law rears its ugly head. In order for the cube of air to change direction, the wing must also. The force on the wing resolves into a drag vector and a vector normal to the wing surface pressing it downwards. No friction required, either for a putative frictionless airfoil or a normal one, they just don't use friction to operate.

Yep, DS, I've seen that in a museum. It had a small jet engine inside the fuselage and used the intake to "vacuum" the boundary layer off the wing. In practice, it clogged up with bugs and airborne crap, but it was awfully interesting while it worked. In the end, the Russians came up with the plasma aerodynamic concept and didn't have the talent or monetary power to develop it. It doesn't clog, although there's many another issue with it.

Just to clarify for the subject, ridding a craft of friction still has HUGE implications for combat. Less friction would still make for a faster craft and one that could turn sharper.

I found this article on FAS.org (Federation of American Scientists)

www.fas.org...

I quote, their quote,

"NASA said yesterday it wants to modify one of its three newly acquired SR-71A Blackbirds to prove the concept of burning hydrogen fuel outside an engine's exhaust nozzles to improve overall flight efficiency....explore a key propulsion concept for the X-30 National Aerospace Plane known as external burning....Engineers want to inject hydrogen fuel into the air stream under the NASP's engines and ignite it to increase pressure near the nozzles and reduce drag....and fly at speeds up to Mach 3."

This means that NASA/US Government is already experimenting with gas/plasma(maybe) to lower the drag on its aircraft.

If friction doesn't matter, pressure clearly does, and gas/plasma appears to be a means by which we can go about lowering/raising it to our advantage.

This article although written in 1996, still applies to this current thread and was written by John Pike, director of Globalsecurity.org. It is well referenced and an easy read.

I found this article online today and feel it pertains to the subject at hand mainly that not only is something like plasma stealth or active forms of stealth possible but they are going on right now and people are confusing them with UFO's.

www.mod.uk...

Even though its 23 pages or so long(it's really only 15) it's a good read and is very insightful if read in the right context.

If I had to summarize it; we should be searching our skies for plasma traces because they might be cloaked spy aircraft or real UAP's/UFO's.

Indeed an interesting article. If anything it begs us to look more closley at our nature and question it with a new set of eyes. If that was all this article does from henceforth, than good.

I never claim to be an expert - but does lack of friction affect inertia in any way? Because if you can defy inertia...Id assume that would pave the way for a more effiecient space travel model, if the theory of the universal superfluid model is correct....

I too am excited about the possible space implications of said technology. For some reason plasma stealth seems like it's a basic form of a warp drive. Since both attempt to change the pressure/bend space-time infront and behind the craft to maximize speed over distance. Plasma stealth does it with extremely hot plasmas encapsulating the craft while the warp drive creates its own bubble in space/time and must use an impossible and unseen amount of energy to accomplish such a feat.

Could Plasma Stealth Technology bring us any closer to Warp Drives/Fields? Who knows, but I hope so!