new propellantless drive company

[coppercone2]

Like the EM drive,

https://thedebrief.org/nasa-veterans-propellantless-propulsion-drive-that-physics-says-shouldnt-work-just-produced-enough-thrust-to-defeat-earths-gravity/

this one uses a capacitor. Instead of piezo (not that a piezo is not a capacitor) , but it sounds similar. That is that there is some unequal force in a polarizing material which leads to thrust. Not a (weak) photon drive.

[BrianHG]

Do you have a link to the article where it's not on a webpage with 40-50 Java Scripts with over 200 ads which need blocking?  Maybe a simple .pdf with specs and measurements, or some kind of brochure.

[tom66]

So far every propellantless drive has failed when tested in space.  Why not add another to the mix, I guess.

[antenna]

I knew a guy who claimed to have something similar, even did some modelling, but he ended up having a heart attack.  I never took him seriously, but now I am starting to hear very similar approaches to what he described.  I wish he was still around.  RIP J.R.

[Gyro]

Asymetric capacitor sounds like an ionic lifter. I thought they needed something to ionize though (I didn't want to unblock that great mass of scripts on that page either!).

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/dodgy-technology/ionic-lifters-has-anyone-else-around-here-build-one/

[coppercone2]

No its related to gravity and mass. they mean in a vacuum. maybe some nebula in space allow for the 'lifter' (electric ion thrust engine) to work on a space ship. If there is alot of gas its like a plane


Only way you can move things without propellant is by changing mass or getting attracted to something (i.e. magnetic 'laser' to aim at moon to pull you up). But using anything in the solar system as a 'target' leads to inverse law problems of basically getting zilch force of attraction.......

or I guess if vacuum is not a vacuum and its ether and you can pump that

both the EM drive and this postulate that a electric field can cause a dielectric to do something new. With this its some thin film stuff and with EM drive its piezo, which is really just a dielectric that happens to respond mechanically to electric field in a strong way.

In EM drive the 'imbalance' is caused by phase shifting the stimulus signals. in this it seems to do with the geometry.  Previous eevblog discussion said it basically has to do with high order solutions to GR field equations. so good luck with that one

[coppercone2]

https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/nasa-veterans-propellantless-propulsion-drive-defies-laws-of-physics

I noticed something though, when you have high power levels, everything is hard to measure. marginal effects that have low energy transfer efficency must be diabolically hard to find

[PlainName]

Do you have a link to the article where it's not on a webpage with 40-50 Java Scripts with over 200 ads which need blocking?  Maybe a simple .pdf with specs and measurements, or some kind of brochure.

edit: patent (granted)

[SiliconWizard]

Electrostatic propulsion is nothing new, so I don't know yet exactly what's new here. Have had a quick look at the patent, which was not too helpful. I'll watch the video if it gives any more detailed info when I get the time.

Nice website anyway: https://www.exoduspropulsion.space/

[woofy]

Sounds like pseudo science looking for grant money, to me.

[mikeselectricstuff]

Where's the video showing it working ?

[wraper]

AFAIK EmDrive was repeatedly tested by different teams. Those which were able to produce any detectable force later turned out to be measurement flaws.

[iMo]

I had a quick look at the patent, and frankly the patent clerk AlbertE would laugh.
In the patent they state the stuff works in an enclosed system. So you have got something generatig a force inside a closed box and it should propell somewhere? That is against the fundamental laws of physics, imho.
They should apply for the Nobel prize as well..

[Sal Ammoniac]

This thread belongs in the Dodgy Technology forum...

[tom66]

I had a quick look at the patent, and frankly the patent clerk AlbertE would laugh.
In the patent they state the stuff works in an enclosed system. So you have got something generatig a force inside a closed box and it should propell somewhere? That is against the fundamental laws of physics, imho.
They should apply for the Nobel prize as well..

All propellantless drives violent fundamental physics laws (if they are to operate in space).

There are two possibilites:
- 100+ years of physics understanding is in error somehow with an effect not yet studied or understood allowing a propellantless drive to function
- They don't actually work

So far no one has made a true propellantless drive function in true space environments.  They have only shown some effect when tested in a lab, but so far this effect has been accounted for as a magnetic bias, thermal air currents, or an experimental error.

Perhaps it is possible, but I have my doubts.

[woofy]

Professor Eric Laithwaite came up with similar nonsense, suggesting that the behaviour of gyroscopes violated the law of conservation of energy. He said there was a device which could displace itself outside of its own center of mass. It ultimately destroyed his reputation and career.

[coppercone2]

that is sad that you can get your reputation and career destroyed for challenging some assumption most people don't even understand. Because you know there is some zealot with no clue what center of gravity even is getting mad because "he challenged alot of smart people!!!' . bit of a religious thing IMO


they might lead the youth astray!!

[Alex Eisenhut]

Buttered toast strapped to a cat?

[Njk]

Some patents can be really funny. Example: https://patents.google.com/patent/US5782134A/en

Anyway it seems at NASA many people made their careers by managing a projects of that kind

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20050041926

[Nominal Animal]

Propellantless drives violate conservation of linear momentum, but not necessarily conservation of energy.  Without going into the theoretical physics of it (because I ain't a theorist), it would require violation of spatial symmetry somehow, because the conservation corresponds to continuous smooth spatial symmetries per Emmy Noether's theorem.

Thing is, if such a violation can be produced using current human technology, we probably should have seen it already in stellar and cosmological phenomena.
Whether we have ("dark energy", et cetera), I do not know.

I can imagine one tiny possibility, though: a variable electric field that not only generates spontaneous electron–positron pairs (Schwinger effect), but also somehow (handwaving magic here) affecting the distribution of linear momentum of those pairs.  Think of Alcubierre drive, but instead of energy density, in the distribution of directions of the linear momentum of the spontaneously generated pairs.  Basically, within the "drive volume" the pairs would have a nonzero sum linear momentum; with the volume outside having the opposite vector sum.

It is extremely unlikely, though.  I do like the idea in the sci-fi sense, because it would be basically "pushing" on space itself; and might not actually violate conservation of energy, or even linear momentum in the strict sense.  https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.2.1191 (1970) would be my starting point.

(Feel free to laugh at me for entertaining such ideas.  I do; it is fun.  )

[m98]

The physics sound whacky, and I can say that nobody in the EP community is taking any of this seriously. That said, I'm looking forward to Martin Tajmar getting bored again and trying this out.

[ejeffrey]

Propellantless drives violate conservation of linear momentum, but not necessarily conservation of energy. 

A violation of conservation of momentum in one reference frame would violate conservation of energy in another reference frame.  Although if you are throwing out conservation  laws I guess you might as well throe out special relativity too.

[Nominal Animal]

Propellantless drives violate conservation of linear momentum, but not necessarily conservation of energy. 

A violation of conservation of momentum in one reference frame would violate conservation of energy in another reference frame.  Although if you are throwing out conservation  laws I guess you might as well throe out special relativity too.

I'm not "throwing out conservation laws"; the one possibility I pulled from my backside could conserve both linear momentum and energy.

Let's consider two inertial reference frames, one before and one after some acceleration with a propellantless drive.  In the first, the violation of conservation of momentum appears to increase the total energy, and decrease in the second.  This is special relativity.  For special relativity to hold, in actuality, the total energy must be conserved instead.

One solution to that problem is to couple the drive, somehow, to a larger system, so that for the entire system both energy and linear momentum is conserved.

If we consider warp drives like Alcubierre drive, they only seem to violate conservation of linear momentum.  They do not, because the (let's say) "anomalous velocity" of the warp drive does not increase the linear momentum; it only exists as long as the drive is "active", and is actually due to the space contracting and expanding with the drive.  (If we observed such a drive, we'd probably see an optical distortion caused by such a drive, but had no other "hints" that it wasn't violating conservation of momentum or energy.)

Now, I have not examined all propellantless drives to find out if they only seem to violate conservation of linear momentum but actually do not (either because of spacetime distortion or by coupling forming a larger system where both linear momentum and energy is conserved), or if there are other solutions to the conservation of energy in different inertial reference frames while violating conservation of linear momentum, for example via quantum-scale effects.  Because of this, I prefer to err on the optimistic side, and assumed other ways might be possible.  If I had preferred to err on the side assuming all of important physics is already known, I would have written something like "Propellantless drives only seem to violate conservation of linear momentum.  They do have to conserve both linear momentum and energy, just like for example the Alcubierre drive does, to not violate physical laws."

I did expressly write I think the one discussed in this thread is extremely unlikely to be a real effect, but it has more to do with the physics models ("laws") that have survived the tests of new measurements –– including special and general relativity –– refining or extending previous models rather than replace them.

[Infraviolet]

I haven't followed the recent news on the EM "drive", but when it first made headlines in 2015 or so, I swear I remember that the thrust it supposedly gave per watt of supplied power was actually worse than the thrust one gets from a "photon drive" (that is to say shining a bright light out of the back and using the conservation of momentum to get a forward thrust, a photon drive gets you 1 N per 300 Megawatts). It seems like the EM "drive" is an experimental error with performance worse than that which would be achieved if one end were removed to make it an ordinary microwave emitter.

[coppercone2]

That is no reason to investigate an effect. Then its just boring physics instead of popsci physics.

I recall reading that it was significantly above photon drive levels though (according to their experiments), IIRC the whole point was that there is a force that is bigger then the force expected from photons.

The usual problem, that is high power electronics lol. the ones that a experienced engineer sees it as a running lawn mower engine hanging on some springs, being measured with a caliper