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The ELF thruster, funded by the Department of Defense, utilizes Rotating Magnetic Field (RMF) and pulsed-inductive technologies that promise radical advances in space propulsion. The ELF creates, forms, and accelerates field-reversed plasma toroids to high velocity. It has demonstrated the ability to efficiently utilize complex propellants such as Martian Air, Liquid Water, and Hydrazine .
The ELF enables a broad range of high-power propulsion missions. Fundamentally, this technology has significantly greater thrust and power densities than any realizable propulsion technology. The ability to operate on in situ propellants will enable very eccentric orbit propulsion, re-fuelable orbital transfer vehicles, deep space return missions, and even direct drag makeup for extremely low orbits. At current power levels, this thruster technology minimizes system mass, size, and cost, while increasing overall mission flexibility. Finally, extending this technology to higher densities and powers that have been demonstrated in the laboratory, there are mission applications in high-altitude, air-breathing, hypersonic flight and beamed-energy upper stage propulsion that are not feasible with traditional technologies. Please see technical publications below for a complete description of experiments, thruster specifications, and results.
an article at next big future says it was tested up to 10 MW.
originally posted by: penroc3
a reply to: stormbringer1701
dang that sure looks fancy mister....
but fore real it look pretty interesting i wonder what is testing them out right now? and i wonder if this could be used with LM new fusion reactor?
i think Slough has his own fusion reactor www.helionenergy.com...
originally posted by: penroc3
a reply to: stormbringer1701
dang that sure looks fancy mister....
but fore real it look pretty interesting i wonder what is testing them out right now? and i wonder if this could be used with LM new fusion reactor?
i can't quite grasp what they mean by air breathing though because they are also talking about CO2 in the martian atmosphere. so i dunno... they talk about hypersonic but they also talk about sound in the plasma flow too so again i dunno if it means what i hope it means. both of those things could be read two different ways.
originally posted by: lostbook
a reply to: stormbringer1701
This sounds way cool. After all of these years of no advancements in Space propulsion now all of a sudden "boom!" Here it is....
i cross posted this from my similar posts in Jadestar's thread on Star Treking to Alpha Centauri. In that thread I posted links to additional information.
originally posted by: charlyv
It seems the high end velocities that could be achieved are impressive, but I could not get a good idea of what the true thrust was, and how long it would take to appreciably accelerate. Wonder how it compares with the ION engines on Dawn.
originally posted by: penroc3
a reply to: charlyv
i bet if you could get a few types of engines or drives of various types together the ramp up to get to a speed where you needed to be wouldn't be to bad.
and if they were electric in nature then a fusion or regular fission power plant would probably cut the propellants down
originally posted by: penroc3
a reply to: stormbringer1701
Right.
I guess i was thinking in a broad context. Say you got your air breathing em thruster into the upper atmosphere with a jet engine and keepp it there with lighter then air technology in a rigid frame then use these new thrusts to maintain your speed with out using any fuel and apparently at high-ish speeds
originally posted by: charlyv Wonder how it compares with the ION engines on Dawn.
ion engine progress has been impressive. third generation hall effect thrusters are 4 times faster than the first generation. this thing is a pulsed thruster with a self confining plasmid torus and the pulses are in high frequencies. it has an exhaust velocity of 40 KM/s. in an ideal situation (with no losses) the max vehicle velocity would be 2X exhaust velocity. that would make for 80 KM/s at 100 KW input power. of course there are inefficiencies and losses that bring this down. but the idea that is at ten MW input power this thing would go screaming across the solar system at unheard of speeds.
originally posted by: _Del_
originally posted by: charlyv Wonder how it compares with the ION engines on Dawn.
An ELF thruster would be a form of Ion engine. An advantage over say a Hall Thruster would be the ability to vary the thrust.
An air-breathing ion engine would produce less thrust than say a xenon version (because of the atomic weights involved).
A single J58 engine (think SR-71) produces 150 kilo-Newtons. The best ion engines currently produce less than one Newton (sustained -- you can get quite a bit more from a pulse, but that seems less than ideal if we're planning on a powerplant as opposed to a maneuvering thruster). People getting excited about air-breathing, hypersonic, ion-driven aircraft are going to be disappointed... You need about 25 kiloWatts to get a Newton of thrust with a heavier propellant. I'll let you do the math and see the problem here. It is a depressingly large amount of energy. Like over 7 GigaWatts. Aircraft carriers produce about 200 MegaWatts for some perspective.
Now, if you designed a satellite with drag-reduction, launched it by traditional chemical rockets into a low-earth orbit, conquered the problem of how to funnel large amounts of atoms into your engine(s) without appreciably adding to drag, solve the problem with erosion, power source, etc you might be able to sustain an ultra-high speed, high-altitude "aircraft". Or just a really low, fast satellite.
ah; but not so long with this. Part of why this is so exciting is because its thrust is not measured in micronewtons
originally posted by: _Del_
a reply to: stormbringer1701
It's going to take lots of time to get to the unheard of speeds. It's ideal for a long-range mission across the solar system because of the efficiency (assuming we figure out how to power it). Pretty bad for trapsing about the atmosphere which I was specifically addressing.
The target goal of the prototype MAP thruster will be 10 MW of average jet power, at an Isp of 5 to 10 ksec, and a
thrust of 200 - 400 N.