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 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 ...

(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 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 spe ...

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 us ...

''without'' wings have existed since the 1960s.

Design and development

The aircraft is a

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, blis ...

made of very light materials, including carbon-fibre, shrink-wrap plastic, balsa wood,

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 ...

, and

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 a ...

. 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 employing a technique known as

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. I ...

. It can fly at around .

Propulsion

The aircraft is an example of an

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 us ...

, which is powered by an

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 ...

generated through controlled electrical discharge. The fuselage contains a stack of 54 lithium-polymer batteries. With the aid of a power supply unit these deliver a minimum of 20,000 volts of electrical potential, producing enough corona discharge to propel the aircraft. Air at the front of the wing is ionized by an electrical field near thin filaments of wire called emitters. Elsewhere on the

airframe The mechanical structure of an aircraft is known as the airframe. This structure is typically considered to include the fuselage, undercarriage, empennage and wings, and excludes the propulsion system. Airframe design is a field of aerospa ...

, collectors attract these positively charged ions. As the ions travel toward the collectors, they collide with air molecules. Energy is transferred from the ions to the air molecules, thereby producing air flow; the thrust propels the aircraft forwards, fast enough to gain flying speed, with the conventional wings providing

aerodynamic lift A fluid flowing around an object exerts a force on it. Lift is the component of this force that is perpendicular to the oncoming flow direction. It contrasts with the drag force, which is the component of the force parallel to the flow direc ...

Operational history

The aircraft has flown at least eleven times, in the duPont Athletic Center, an indoor gymnasium on the MIT campus. The flight distances have been constrained by the long space within the gymnasium, and the aircraft normally flies about off the ground.

References

External links

MIT website page showing video of aircraft in flight
{{Emerging technologies, transport=yes 2010s United States experimental aircraft Unmanned aerial vehicles of the United States