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Ionocraft
An ion-propelled aircraft or ionocraft is an aircraft that uses electrohydrodynamics (EHD) to provide lift or thrust in the air without requiring combustion or moving parts. Current designs do not produce sufficient thrust for manned flight or useful loads. History Origins The principle of ionic wind propulsion with corona-generated charged particles was discovered soon after the discovery of electricity with references dating to 1709 in a book titled ''Physico-Mechanical Experiments on Various Subjects'' by Francis Hauksbee. VTOL "lifter" experiments American experimenter Thomas Townsend Brown spent much of his life working on the principle, under the mistaken impression that it was an anti-gravity effect, which he named the Biefeld–Brown effect. Since his devices produced thrust in the direction of the field gradient, regardless of the direction of gravity, and did not work in a vacuum, other workers realized that the effect was due to EHD. VTOL ion-propelled aircraft are s ...
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Thomas Townsend Brown
Thomas Townsend Brown (March 18, 1905 – October 27, 1985) was an American inventor whose research into odd electrical effects led him to believe he had discovered a connection between strong electric fields and gravity, a type of antigravity effect. Instead of being an antigravity force, what Brown observed has generally been attributed to electrohydrodynamics, the movement of charged particles that transfers their momentum to surrounding neutral particles in air, also called "ionic drift" or "Ion wind, ionic wind". For most of Brown's life he attempted to develop devices based on his ideas, trying to promote them for use by industry and the military. The phenomena came to be called the "Biefeld–Brown effect" and "electrogravitics". In recent years Brown's research has had an influence in the community of amateur experimenters who build "Ionocraft, ionic propulsion lifters" powered by high voltage. There are still claims that Brown discovered antigravity, an idea popular wi ...
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Alexander Prokofieff De Seversky
Alexander Nikolaievich Prokofiev de Seversky (russian: link=no, Алекса́ндр Никола́евич Проко́фьев-Се́верский) (June 7, 1894 – August 24, 1974) was a Russian-American aviation pioneer, inventor, and influential advocate of strategic air power. Early life Of noble Russian parentage, Seversky was born in Tiflis, Russian Empire (now Tbilisi, Georgia). He entered a military school at age 10. Seversky's father was one of the first Russian aviators to own an aircraft (a modified Blériot XI built by Mikheil Grigorashvili) and by the age of 14, when Seversky entered the Imperial Russian Naval Academy, his father had already taught him how to fly. Graduating in 1914 with an engineering degree, Lieutenant Seversky was serving at sea with a destroyer flotilla when World War I began.De Seversky 1961, p. 15. World War I Seversky was selected for duty as a naval aviator, transferring to the Military School of Aeronautics at Sebastopol, Crimea. ...
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Anti-gravity
Anti-gravity (also known as non-gravitational field) is a hypothetical phenomenon of creating a place or object that is free from the force of gravity. It does not refer to the lack of weight under gravity experienced in free fall or orbit, or to balancing the force of gravity with some other force, such as electromagnetism or aerodynamic lift. Anti-gravity is a recurring concept in science fiction. Examples are the gravity blocking substance "Cavorite" in H. G. Wells's ''The First Men in the Moon'' and the Spindizzy machines in James Blish's ''Cities in Flight''. "Anti-gravity" is often used to refer to devices that look as if they reverse gravity even though they operate through other means, such as lifters, which fly in the air by moving air with electromagnetic fields. Historical attempts at understanding gravity The possibility of creating anti-gravity depends upon a complete understanding and description of gravity and its interactions with other physical theories, such ...
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Wingless Electromagnetic Air Vehicle
The Wingless Electromagnetic Air Vehicle (WEAV) is a heavier than air flight system developed at the University of Florida, funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. The WEAV was invented in 2006 by Dr. Subrata Roy, plasma physicist, aerospace engineering professor at the University of Florida, and has been a subject of several patents.Japanese Patent no. 5,220,742 granted on March 15, 2013. The WEAV employs no moving parts, and combines the aircraft structure, propulsion, energy production and storage, and control subsystems into one integrated system. Operating mechanism The WEAV uses a multitude of small electrodes covering the whole wetted area of the aircraft, in a multi-barrier plasma actuator (MBPA) arrangement, an enhancement over dual-electrode dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) systems using multiple layers of dielectric materials and powered electrodes. These electrodes are very close to one another so surrounding air can be ionized using RF AC high v ...
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Ionic Wind
Ion wind, ionic wind, corona wind or electric wind is the airflow induced by electrostatic forces linked to corona discharge arising at the tips of some sharp conductors (such as points or blades) subjected to high voltage relative to ground. Ion wind is an electrohydrodynamic phenomenon. Ion wind generators can also be considered electrohydrodynamic thrusters. The term "ionic wind" is considered a misnomer due to misconceptions that only positive and negative ions were primarily involved in the phenomenon. A 2018 study found that electrons play a larger role than the negative ions during the negative voltage period. As a result, the term "electric wind" has been suggested as a more accurate terminology. This phenomenon is now used in an MIT ionic wind plane, the first solid state plane, developed in 2018. History B. Wilson in 1750 demonstrated the recoil force associated to the same corona discharge and precursor to the ion thruster was the corona discharge pinwheel. The co ...
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Aircraft
An aircraft is a vehicle that is able to fly by gaining support from the air. It counters the force of gravity by using either static lift or by using the dynamic lift of an airfoil, or in a few cases the downward thrust from jet engines. Common examples of aircraft include airplanes, helicopters, airships (including blimps), gliders, paramotors, and hot air balloons. The human activity that surrounds aircraft is called ''aviation''. The science of aviation, including designing and building aircraft, is called '' aeronautics.'' Crewed aircraft are flown by an onboard pilot, but unmanned aerial vehicles may be remotely controlled or self-controlled by onboard computers. Aircraft may be classified by different criteria, such as lift type, aircraft propulsion, usage and others. History Flying model craft and stories of manned flight go back many centuries; however, the first manned ascent — and safe descent — in modern times took place by larger hot-air ...
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MIT EAD Airframe Version 2
The EAD Airframe Version 2, or V2, is a small American unmanned aircraft. It has been described as ' solid state', as there are no moving parts in the propulsion system; all thrust is powered by the phenomenon known as ion wind. It is being developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics by engineer Steven Barrett (associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics) and others. It is claimed to be the first ion-propelled airplane. Ion-propelled aircraft ''without'' wings have existed since the 1960s. Design and development The aircraft is a flying wing made of very light materials, including carbon-fibre, shrink-wrap plastic, balsa wood, polystyrene, and Kevlar. It has a very wide open frame serving as a fuselage, in and below which thin wires are strung horizontally. The aircraft weighs just over and has a wingspan of . The MIT engineers were able fine tune the aircraft to find the best design and power requirement by em ...
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Massachusetts Institute Of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the most prestigious and highly ranked academic institutions in the world. Founded in response to the increasing industrialization of the United States, MIT adopted a European polytechnic university model and stressed laboratory instruction in applied science and engineering. MIT is one of three private land grant universities in the United States, the others being Cornell University and Tuskegee University. The institute has an urban campus that extends more than a mile (1.6 km) alongside the Charles River, and encompasses a number of major off-campus facilities such as the MIT Lincoln Laboratory, the Bates Center, and the Haystack Observatory, as well as affiliated laboratories such as the Broad and Whitehead Institutes. , 98 ...
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Ion (physics)
An ion () is an atom or molecule with a net electric charge, electrical charge. The charge of an electron is considered to be negative by convention and this charge is equal and opposite to the charge of a proton, which is considered to be positive by convention. The net charge of an ion is not zero because its total number of electrons is unequal to its total number of protons. A cation is a positively charged ion with fewer electrons than protons while an anion is a negatively charged ion with more electrons than protons. Opposite electric charges are pulled towards one another by electrostatic force, so cations and anions attract each other and readily form ionic compounds. Ions consisting of only a single atom are termed atomic or monatomic ions, while two or more atoms form molecular ions or polyatomic ions. In the case of physical ionization in a fluid (gas or liquid), "ion pairs" are created by spontaneous molecule collisions, where each generated pair consists of a fr ...
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Air Propulsion
Propulsion is the generation of force by any combination of pushing or pulling to modify the translational motion of an object, which is typically a rigid body (or an articulated rigid body) but may also concern a fluid. The term is derived from two Latin words: ''pro'', meaning'' before'' or ''forward''; and '' pellere'', meaning ''to drive''. A propulsion system consists of a source of mechanical power, and a ''propulsor'' (means of converting this power into propulsive force). Plucking a guitar string to induce a vibratory translation is technically a form of propulsion of the guitar string; this is not commonly depicted in this vocabulary, even though human muscles are considered to propel the fingertips. The motion of an object moving through a gravitational field is affected by the field, and within some frames of reference physicists speak of the gravitational field generating a force upon the object, but for deep theoretic reasons, physicists now consider the curved p ...
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Microgrant
A microgrant is a small sum of money distributed to an individual or organization, typically for hundreds or thousands of dollars, with the intent of enabling the recipient to develop or sustain an income-generating enterprise. Often they target individuals living on less than $1/day, extreme poverty, for the purpose of creating a sustainable livelihood or microenterprise. Recipients of microgrants can also be organizations or grassroots groups that are engaged in charitable activities. se to seek out a loan, or do not qualify for a microloan or other form of microcredit. There are three primary types of microgrants; one is a small sum of money (~US$50-500) granted to an individual to start an income-generating project, another is a small grant (~$2,000-$10,000) to a community for an impact-oriented projects and a third is a small grant to an individual for any cause they see fit. The term microgrant can also refer to a grant that is low in value. Microgrants for income-generati ...
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Electrical Energy
Electrical energy is energy related to forces on electrically charged particles and the movement of electrically charged particles (often electrons in wires, but not always). This energy is supplied by the combination of electric current and electric potential (often referred to as voltage because electric potential is measured in volts) that is delivered by an electrical circuit (e.g., provided by an electric power utility). Motion (current) is not required; for example, if there is a voltage difference in combination with charged particles, such as static electricity or a charged capacitor, the moving electrical energy is typically converted to another form of energy (e.g., thermal, motion, sound, light, radio waves, etc.). Electrical energy is usually sold by the kilowatt hour (1 kW·h = 3.6 MJ) which is the product of the power in kilowatts multiplied by running time in hours. Electric utilities measure energy using an electricity meter, which keeps a running total of the elec ...
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