Fossil Fuel-Free Jet Propulsion with Air Plasmas
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for AndyTheAbsurd:
Fossil fuel-free jet propulsion with air plasmas:
A team of researchers at the Institute of Technological Sciences at Wuhan University has demonstrated a prototype device that uses microwave air plasmas for jet propulsion. They describe the engine in the journal AIP Advances, from AIP Publishing.
"The motivation of our work is to help solve the global warming problems owing to humans' use of fossil fuel combustion engines to power machinery, such as cars and airplanes," said author Jau Tang, a professor at Wuhan University. "There is no need for fossil fuel with our design, and therefore, there is no carbon emission to cause greenhouse effects and global warming."
[...] The researchers created a plasma jet by compressing air into high pressures and using a microwave to ionize the pressurized air stream.
[...] The prototype plasma jet device can lift a 1-kilogram steel ball over a 24-millimeter diameter quartz tube, where the high-pressure air is converted into a plasma jet by passing through a microwave ionization chamber. To scale, the corresponding thrusting pressure is comparable to a commercial airplane jet engine.
By building a large array of these thrusters with high-power microwave sources, the prototype design can be scaled up to a full-sized jet. The authors are working on improving the efficiency of the device toward this goal.
The article, "Jet propulsion by microwave air plasma in the atmosphere," is authored by Dan Ye, Jun Li and Jau Tang. The article will appear in AIP Advances on May 5, 2020 (DOI: 10.1063/5.0005814). After that date, it can be accessed at http://aip.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/5.0005814.
Without information about how much electrical power is used, it's impossible to say if this could be a realistic replacement for fossil-fuel jets.
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.