Quantum vacuum plasma thruster

originally posted by: anonentity

originally posted by: Kashai
a reply to: skunkape23

PDF Files....

Eagleworks Laboratories: Advanced Propulsion Physics Research
Dr. Harold “Sonny” White, Paul March, Nehemiah Williams, William O’Neill NASA Johnson Space Center Houston, TX
ABSTRACT

Source

Nuclear and Emerging Technologies for Space (2012) 3082

Source

Anomalous Thrust Production from an RF Test Device
Measured on a Low-Thrust Torsion Pendulum
David A. Brady, Harold G. White, Paul March, James T. Lawrence, and Frank J. Davies
NASA Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas 77058

Source

Any thoughts?


My only thought was why go to such lengths to propel a spacecraft. If space sails are supposed to work. Why not something like a giant torch. The acceleration would be slow at first, but cumulative. The fuel/ matter that turns into photons. Would last a long time, and theoretically given enough time, reach near light speeds.

a idealized photon rocket is incredibly weak. the power needed to make the photons would be better spent powering an electric drive ion drive or even a chemical rocket. despite what was prevalent in vintage science fiction photon drives suck.

Courtesy of project rho:

(ed note: the photon drive, where one lousy Newton of thrust takes three hundred freaking megawatts!!)

but the issue with chemical and ion drives is that you do not escape the rocket equation no matter how efficient your engine is. you will run out of fuel or working fluid before you get a light year.

But a pure EM drive will not. and though a EM drive has a fairly small amount of power output it can accelerate as long as the power source lasts. this means your top speed is dictated by the amount you can accelerate until the point at which you must begin to deaccelerate (typically the halfway point between here and the destination.) And of course the constraints of relativity/light speed limit.

a reply to: stormbringer1701

Interesting, you know Science documentaries present that Ion Propulsion can take us to 99.99% of light.

Can you elaborate?

originally posted by: Kashai
a reply to: stormbringer1701

Interesting, you know Science documentaries present that Ion Propulsion can take us to 99.99% of light.

Can you elaborate?

there is a practical limit. when you get closer to light speed your inertial mass increases. this requires more and more power to maintain acceleration. if you could continue to up the power output you would still need more and more fuel to do it. ion drives are efficient and require really little fuel but they still require and use fuel. your tanks can't be big enough to get them to light speed just like your tanks can't be big enough for a chemical rocket to do it. the ion drive can accelerate for longer than a chemical rocket but it will run into the same limitations a chemical drive would because they both work by throwing stuff out the backside. so you have to have that stuff on board.

this does not mean an ion drive cannot be used for interstellar travel. it just means you cannot expect it to travel at vanishingly close to light speed. at .25 light speed it would take a ship a little over 16 years to get to the nearest star. how long has voyager been travelling? the fact that an ion drive can't get to light speed isn't too big of an issue. it'll do.

double post

a reply to: stormbringer1701

In speculation it is possible satellites designed to do just that already exist.

Hypothetically speaking what would happen if a spherical object, say the size of a soccer ball, made of our densest material where to be spun at near the speed of light?

What about as close as we can get to that speed under the same conditions.

Any thoughts?

a reply to: stormbringer1701

It all requires a loss of mass with regards to fuel . What about the mass being reusable and contained inside the ship? If say for example if the mass was an electromagnet on a rod that went the length of the ship. On the face of it the ship would have ejected mass until it reached the other end of the rod, and tore a hole in the rear of the ship. But on the other hand if the kinetic energy was turned into heat, via a shock absorber. The deceleration force wouldn't be the same as the accelerating one. So theoretically the ship would move forward. The heat generated by fluid friction in the absorbing medium could be used for practical purposes?

originally posted by: anonentity
a reply to: stormbringer1701

It all requires a loss of mass with regards to fuel . What about the mass being reusable and contained inside the ship? If say for example if the mass was an electromagnet on a rod that went the length of the ship. On the face of it the ship would have ejected mass until it reached the other end of the rod, and tore a hole in the rear of the ship. But on the other hand if the kinetic energy was turned into heat, via a shock absorber. The deceleration force wouldn't be the same as the accelerating one. So theoretically the ship would move forward. The heat generated by fluid friction in the absorbing medium could be used for practical purposes?

for there to be real thrust the ejected mass has to detach from the ship. this is why some people questioned whether VASIMR would work because they had not demonstrated the phenomenon of detachment of the plasma.

on another note: the engineers over at NASA have switched from the question of whether the Cannae device and it's siblings would work to the max velocity they can achieve. right now it's not looking good. there is a velocity beyond which paradox is invoked. the point where the velocity is 2 times the energy input. at that point it violates conservation laws. the best is White's QVPT at 93.8 KM/S. the others are pretty pathetic.

for any vehicle power P, the thrust that may be provided is:
ThrustForce = 2*Power/velocity



EXAMPLES

For

(Brady TE mode) ThrustForce/power: 0.00002131 Newton/Watt

ParadoxVelocity = 2/0.00002131 m/s = 93853 m/s = 93.85 km/s

For

(Prof. Juan Yang et.al. China) ThrustForce/power: 0.000290 Newton/Watt

ParadoxVelocity = 2/0.000290 m/s = 6897 m/s = 6.90 km/s


For

(Cannae Superconducting) ThrustForce/power: 0.0009524 Newton/Watt

ParadoxVelocity = 2/0.0009524 m/s = 2100 m/s = 2.10 km/s

originally posted by: Kashai
a reply to: stormbringer1701

In speculation it is possible satellites designed to do just that already exist.

Hypothetically speaking what would happen if a spherical object, say the size of a soccer ball, made of our densest material where to be spun at near the speed of light?

What about as close as we can get to that speed under the same conditions.

Any thoughts?

i have read that rotational acceleration is not relative. that there are frames where rotational force can be distinguished from other types of acceleration or gravity. relativity rules do not apply to it.

a reply to: stormbringer1701

For me that is kind of weird as a rotational velocity could potentially result in Infinite Density.

What is the basis?

Consider the rotation of a neutron star and the potential of a black hole rotating at a greater accelerated rate?

originally posted by: Kashai
a reply to: stormbringer1701

For me that is kind of weird as a rotational velocity could potentially result in Infinite Density.

What is the basis?

just an old article i read and probably cannot find again.

a reply to: stormbringer1701

There was this old book I read once that offered the idea that electrons orbited the nucleus of the atom at 10% the speed of light.

I have also heard that time dilation is not a factor until speeds above 1/2 that of light.

Thanks for your response friend but consider that you really did not answer my questions?

because i am not certain what would happen.

a reply to: stormbringer1701

One way of looking at it is that Infinite density stops time as we understanding it and so do singularities.

Sproing!

Necroing because Dr Paul March who works with Dr White in addition to having lots of his own stuff going on and occasionally working with Dr Woodward has updated the folks at the NASA space flight advanced concepts forum with the current status of Dr White's work and progress towards being ready for independant replication:

Folks:

The Eagleworks Lab is still working on the copper frustum thruster that was reported on last summer at the AIAA/JPC. We have now confirmed that there is a thrust signature in a hard vacuum (~5.0x10^-6 Torr) in both the forward direction, (approx. +50 micro-Newton (uN) with 50W at 1,937.115 MHz), and the reversed direction, (up to -16uN with a failing RF amp), when the thruster is rotated 180 degrees on the torque pendulum. However we continue to fight through RF amplifier failures brought on by having to operate them in a hard vacuum with few $$$ resources to fix them when they break, so the desired data is coming along very slowly. We are still working on obtaining enough data though that will allow us to go to Glenn Research Center (GRC) for a replication effort in the next few months. However that will only happen if we can make the thrust signature large enough since the GRC thrust stand can only measure down to ~50uN, so we have to get the thrust signature up to at least 100uN before we can go to GRC.

As to the theoretical side of Q-Thrusters, Dr. White has just developed the first cut at a quantum vacuum (QV) based plasma code written in C+ under Windows/Unix and VMD visualization software that utilizes the COMSOL E&M derived field data for a given thruster geometry that allows one to track the movement and velocity of a subset of the QV's electron/positron neutral plasma pairs in the thruster over time as they respond to the applied time varying RF E&M fields in the copper frustum resonant cavity and to each other. This package also allows one to calculate the expected thrust for a given input power and quality factor of the frustum resonant cavity based of standard plasma rocket physics. So far the estimated thrust verses experimental observations are within 2% for the first experimental data run I compared it to, but we still have a long, long road ahead of us of experimental validation before we have any real confidence in this very new Q-Thruster design tool.

Best, Paul March

a reply to: stormbringer1701

I appreciate your impute but would ask you provide a source??

Any thoughts?

a reply to: Kashai

Honestly; i don't want to post a direct link because there are many here who would run afoul of the TOS at that forum. They might cause enough trouble to get the thread closed. That said. it is easy enough to find. you can either google "Nasa advanced concepts forum" and look near the top of the first page for the thread called in part: "em drive developments..." or you could just copy a paragraph or two from what i quoted here and put that into the search engine. either method will get you to the original cite source.

Oh we could finally have jetpacks!

originally posted by: FormOfTheLord

Oh we could finally have jetpacks!

this thing hasn't enough thrust to bust a piece of wet toilet paper. it will not work to get anything off the face of the earth. it's power lies in two attributes: it appears not to be subject to the rocket equation in that it does not work by expelling a working fluid which must be carried along with the payload, and it can fire for years and year or centuries so it accumulates velocity over time.

These attributes make it nearly ideal for long (even taken to the extremes of long duration and distance space flight.)

a reply to: stormbringer1701

I know how to access the data.

NASA should not close threads because of that, they should ban members and remove unfounded responses.