Wild new NASA plasma tech reduces drag during hypersonic flight

[Admin]

NASA is licensing a radical new form of propulsion that uses electromagnets to control the flow of plasma over aircraft and spacecraft flying at hypersonic speeds.

Wild new NASA plasma tech reduces drag during hypersonic flight : Read more

 

[danR]

Interesting.
Back in the 60's, as a teen, I envisioned a sort of MHD hypersonic propulsion system. A high-energy linear accelerator would partly ionize the air in front of the nose of an aircraft. Rings of coils energized sequentially down the fuselage would accelerate the ionized gas front to back*. I don't know if the idea was original.
The electric power requirements seemed prohibitive.

But in this passive system, the regenerative factor provides its own ingenious 'power-plant'.
____
* For brevity I've left out some details.

 

[motie]

Can somebody expllain why there is a potential difference between the + and - electrodes? It seems to me that the ionized atmosphere would have the same potential everywhere.

 

[Unclear Engineer]

Can somebody expllain why there is a potential difference between the + and - electrodes? It seems to me that the ionized atmosphere would have the same potential everywhere.

I'm not familiar with this, so I am not clear about how the magnetohydrodynamics is configured. I suspect the developers are not eager to explain it well enough for others to duplicate - e.g., in Russia or China.

That said, I would expect the magnetic field extending outside the vehicle surface to cause the ionized gases flowing through it (as they pass along the vehicle surface) to separate the + and - charged ions in the flow to some degree, because the different charges will try to curve in opposite directions in the magnetic field. The plasma stream would then be changed from neutral to 2 flowing currents passing over adjacent areas of the vehicle surface. Those currents can then be used to induce currents in nearby conductors inside the vehicle, just like in any typical transformer.

How that all gets put together in a design that does something useful seems to be the development project that has been going on for more than half of the last century. So, it is probably not simple.

 

[MasterOgon]

Interesting. The study of vibration and rotation is also mentioned here. Now I think I know why I was banned twice on the NASA forum for my research on vibration flight, which I also posted here. Despite the fact that you can even publish inertial propulsive nonsense there. After all, they could, as always, call it a mistake and close the topic instead of deleting it and banning me.