MIT EAD Airframe Version 2
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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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Ion 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 c ...
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Experimental Aircraft
An experimental aircraft is an aircraft intended for testing new aerospace technologies and design concepts. The term ''research aircraft'' or ''testbed aircraft'', by contrast, generally denotes aircraft modified to perform scientific studies, such as weather research or geophysical surveying, similar to a research vessel. United States The term "experimental aircraft" also has specific legal meaning in Australia, the United States and some other countries; usually used to refer to aircraft flown with an experimental certificate. In the United States, this also includes most homebuilt aircraft, many of which are based on conventional designs and hence are experimental only in name because of certain restrictions in operation.14CFR 21.191
US Federal Aviation Administration. Retrieved 2018-01 ...
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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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Solid-state Electronics
Solid-state electronics means semiconductor electronics: electronic equipment using semiconductor devices such as transistors, diodes and integrated circuits (ICs). The term is also used as an adjective for devices in which semiconductor electronics that have no moving parts replace devices with moving parts, such as the solid-state relay in which transistor switches are used in place of a moving-arm electromechanical relay, or the solid-state drive (SSD) a type of semiconductor memory used in computers to replace hard disk drives, which store data on a rotating disk. History The term "solid-state" became popular at the beginning of the semiconductor era in the 1960s to distinguish this new technology based on the transistor, in which the electronic action of devices occurred in a solid state, from previous electronic equipment that used vacuum tubes, in which the electronic action occurred in a gaseous state. A semiconductor device works by controlling an electric current ...
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Airplane
An airplane or aeroplane (informally plane) is a fixed-wing aircraft that is propelled forward by thrust from a jet engine, propeller, or rocket engine. Airplanes come in a variety of sizes, shapes, and wing configurations. The broad spectrum of uses for airplanes includes recreation, transportation of goods and people, military, and research. Worldwide, commercial aviation transports more than four billion passengers annually on airliners and transports more than 200 billion tonne-kilometersMeasured in RTKs—an RTK is one tonne of revenue freight carried one kilometer. of cargo annually, which is less than 1% of the world's cargo movement. Most airplanes are flown by a pilot on board the aircraft, but some are designed to be remotely or computer-controlled such as drones. The Wright brothers invented and flew the first airplane in 1903, recognized as "the first sustained and controlled heavier-than-air powered flight".
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Ion-propelled Aircraft
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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Flying Wing
A flying wing is a tailless fixed-wing aircraft that has no definite fuselage, with its crew, payload, fuel, and equipment housed inside the main wing structure. A flying wing may have various small protuberances such as pods, nacelles, blisters, booms, or vertical stabilizers. Similar aircraft designs, that are not technically flying wings, are sometimes casually referred to as such. These types include blended wing body aircraft and lifting body aircraft, which have a fuselage and no definite wings. A pure flying wing is theoretically the lowest drag design configuration for a fixed wing aircraft. However, because it lacks conventional stabilizing surfaces and the associated control surfaces, in its purest form the flying wing suffers from being unstable and difficult to control. The basic flying wing configuration became an object of significant study during the 1920s, often in conjunction with other tailless designs. In the Second World War, both Nazi Germany and the A ...
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Polystyrene
Polystyrene (PS) is a synthetic polymer made from monomers of the aromatic hydrocarbon styrene. Polystyrene can be solid or foamed. General-purpose polystyrene is clear, hard, and brittle. It is an inexpensive resin per unit weight. It is a poor barrier to oxygen and water vapour and has a relatively low melting point. Polystyrene is one of the most widely used plastics, the scale of its production being several million tonnes per year. Polystyrene can be naturally transparent, but can be colored with colorants. Uses include protective packaging (such as packing peanuts and in the jewel cases used for storage of optical discs such as CDs and occasionally DVDs), containers, lids, bottles, trays, tumblers, disposable cutlery, in the making of models, and as an alternative material for phonograph records. As a thermoplastic polymer, polystyrene is in a solid (glassy) state at room temperature but flows if heated above about 100 °C, its glass transition temperature. I ...
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Kevlar
Kevlar (para-aramid) is a strong, heat-resistant synthetic fiber, related to other aramids such as Nomex and Technora. Developed by Stephanie Kwolek at DuPont in 1965, the high-strength material was first used commercially in the early 1970s as a replacement for steel in racing tires. It is typically spun into ropes or fabric sheets that can be used as such, or as an ingredient in composite material components. Kevlar has many applications, ranging from bicycle tires and racing sails to bulletproof vests, all due to its high tensile strength-to-weight ratio; by this measure it is five times stronger than steel. It is also used to make modern marching drumheads that withstand high impact; and for mooring lines and other underwater applications. A similar fiber called Twaron with the same chemical structure was developed by Akzo in the 1970s; commercial production started in 1986, and Twaron is now manufactured by Teijin. History Poly-paraphenylene terephthalamide (K2 ...
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Geometric Programming
A geometric program (GP) is an optimization problem of the form : \begin \mbox & f_0(x) \\ \mbox & f_i(x) \leq 1, \quad i=1, \ldots, m\\ & g_i(x) = 1, \quad i=1, \ldots, p, \end where f_0,\dots,f_m are posynomials and g_1,\dots,g_p are monomials. In the context of geometric programming (unlike standard mathematics), a monomial is a function from \mathbb_^n to \mathbb defined as :x \mapsto c x_1^ x_2^ \cdots x_n^ where c > 0 \ and a_i \in \mathbb . A posynomial is any sum of monomials.S. Boyd, S. J. Kim, L. Vandenberghe, and A. Hassibi. A Tutorial on Geometric Programming'' Retrieved 20 October 2019. Geometric programming is closely related to convex optimization: any GP can be made convex by means of a change of variables. GPs have numerous applications, including component sizing in IC design, aircraft design, maximum likelihood estimation for logistic regression in statistics, and parameter tuning of positive linear systems in control theory. Convex form Geometric programs ...
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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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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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