Flying saucer to use air as fuel

A University of Florida researcher is designing a flying saucer that uses plasma and surrounding air as its fuel to generate lift. The aircraft's skin will be studded with electrodes that ionize the air, converting it into plasma. Mechanical and aerospace engineering associate professor Subrata Royh hopes to have a six inch working prototype in the next year.

Using an onboard source of energy (such as a battery, ultracapacitor, solar panel or any combination thereof), the electrodes will send an electrical current into the plasma, causing the plasma to push against the neutral (noncharged) air surrounding the craft, theoretically generating enough force for liftoff and movement in different directions (depending on where on the craft's surface you direct the electrical current)...

Theoretically, Roy says, the flying saucer can be as large as anyone wants to build it, because the design gives the aircraft balance and stability. In other words, this type of aircraft could someday be built large enough to ferry around people. But, Roy says, "we need to walk before we can run, so we're starting small."

The biggest hurdle to building a WEAV large enough to carry passengers would be making the craft light, yet powerful enough to lift its cargo and energy source. Roy is not sure what kind of energy source he will use yet. He anticipates that the craft's body will be made from a material that is an insulator such as ceramic, which is light and a good conductor of electricity. "In theory you probably should be able to scale it up," says Anthony Colozza, a researcher with government contractor Analex Corporation who is stationed at NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland and helped Roy draw up the original plans for powering the saucer. The choice of a power source that is powerful, yet lightweight is "probably going to be the thing that makes or breaks it."

Flying saucer (Scientific American)

UPDATE: As several commenters point out, saying that the saucer uses air as fuel, as I did in my post based on the SciAm articl, isn't really correct.

• [Mim]

  Flying saucer that uses air? Flying saucers should be in space and there’s no air in space! Except, of course, for the Air ‘n Space Museum…

• [Takuan]

  yes, yes, all very well and good – but how can this be used to kill people and destroy property?

• [Joe]

  Exactly right; it’s nonsense to say that this design would use air as fuel.

• [Anonymous]

  “a material that is an insulator … and a good conductor of electricity”

  I’m hearing alarm bells.

• [mmrtnt]

  Why do I have a mental image of one of these things, full of people, running into a pole at a landing field and exploding as a news reporter screams about “the humanity”?

• [creative intuition]

  UFOs in the sense of flying saucers don’t exist. There are no secret government UFO projects. Area 51 has nothing to do with aliens, but instead has to do with covering up illegal waste dumping in the area. Since the area is protected by the government: they can’t be sued. Flying Saucers are merely an illusion or misinterpretation of something common (like a hot air candle powered balloon, helicopter, aircraft or the moon). Don’t belittle the power of suggestion. In this same way creatures such as big foot have been invented. If you want to see things that aren’t there: just stay up for 24 or more hours. You will begin to see illusions (you will be dreaming awake).

• [Guesstimate Jones]

  What if I told you a material can be both a conductor and and insulator, and I can prove it?

• [Preston Sturges]

  http://www.rexresearch.com/desev/desev.htm

  Popular Mechanics 1964
  Major De Seversky’s Ion-Propelled Aircraft
  by Hans Fantel
  An ion-generated wind will lift and propel this incredible magic carpet of the future……

• [spazzm]

  I’m with those that have pointed out that this doesn’t use air as fuel, and that there’s no air in space.

  There’s another whopper too:
  “He anticipates that the craft’s body will be made from a material that is an insulator such as ceramic, which is light and a good conductor of electricity.”(emphasis mine)

  So an insulator is a good conductor of electricity? Really?

  SciAm must be quite desperate to hire spanners like Mr. Larry Greenemeier.

• [Fran Six]

  Dr. Eric Lerner’s fusion model is no bigger than a breadbox:

  http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1518007279479871760

  This is the kind of stuff I require: Greyish concrete-like hull plating; choice gear struts with bulging tires; big, gaping intakes feeding scram jets; ultraviolet lighting; casual tennis shirts and generally summery pilot attire; beautifully tinted canopies; somewhere to go.

  That’s it!

  F6

• [Master of Space and Time]

  It s so crazy !!

  We know this technology for 40 years !
  75% of UFO we can see in the the sky are this kind of propulsion sytem…

  Plasma or Antigravity… All those kind of technology could give us free energy and no pollution at all…

  Lobbies try to keep oil forever and make money on us from decades now ! All the balance of the world has a link with energy industries…

  http://www.masterofspaceandtime.org/masterofspaceandtime/antigravit/index.html

  http://disclosureproject.org/

• [Preston Sturges]

  And what’s all this about generating lift with a “push against the neutral (noncharged) air surrounding the craft?” Rockets don’t “push against the air!”

• [spazzm]

  The comments on the SciAm site are funny too:
  “Nostradamus predicted the wave machine. It is interesting to note that wave and weav has the same letters. My theory of the wave machine was sound wave levitation ; however , this machine might be close.”

  Yeah, real interesting…

• [Fran Six]

  I didn’t want to give away all of my secrects right away, but I do think the plasma stuff should go on the inside of the ducts, not the outside of the skin. Where are people’s engineering acumen these days?

• [DrPete]

  Lets not blame the boing boing writer, the one to blame is Larry Greenemeier at Scientific American, and the editor. I didn’t know that they were writing fiction over at SciAmer.

  Disappointing!!!

• [Falcon_Seven]

  “Roy is not sure what kind of energy source he will use yet.”
  I would suggest anti-matter channeled through a dilithium crystal matrix.

• [stevew]

  Thank you #6. I remember that too. They’re going to need a lot of power to ionize enough air and the 1964 version flew, with a very large tether supplying the power.

• [aubiematt]

  I think saying using air as a fuel is probably wrong. It’s pretty obvious to me that the actual “fuel” in this post would be whatever is charging the battery or producing electricity for the machine. The air, in this case, would be used for lift much like an airplane uses air for lift. Air is what makes it fly and air is what could potentially propel this device forward.

• [Master of Space and Time]

  It s cleaner to get flying saucer this way than USA to admit that they were stolen from the Nazi !!

  Remember… All the rest in desinformation

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip

• [doug117]

  So…

  plasma has more thrust than, say, an electric fan?

• [Moon]

  This won’t work. Mark my words.

  :D

• [Gainclone]

  To quote the sentry bot from WALL•E, “Wrong.”

• [Church]

  Yeah, this is like people who talk about hydrogen as fuel.

  OK, is this horse dead yet? Maybe another thwack, just to make sure.

• [zuzu]

  Check out UFOs: The Real History.

• [GregLondon]

  Hey, I found it. This was the little flying machine they got to work on mythbusters. it was sold as an antigravity device, but it ionized the air to generate a tiny amount of thrust.

• [WiredEarp]

  Yep, I dont see much thats new here, lifters have been doing this for years. Also, worlds first flying saucer? WTF? I thought Scientific American was vaguely reputable…

• [Daemon]

  #6 – my thoughts exactly.

• [RedShirt77]

  the 1990′s era computer rendering should be the first BS warning.

  I think I had the same image on my trapper keeper.

  Off to design my Star wars speeder…

• [Avram]

  Guesstimate Jones, I’d ask if maybe you were talking about something that’s a thermal insulator and an electrical conductor.

• [Gal_n_AL]

  Flying saucer to use air as fuel–that was accomplished back in the 60′s. They called it a Frisbee! (sorry for the lame joke, couldn’t resist)

• [Anonymous]

  Well I am not sure about the using air as a fuel thing but it is possible threw ionization to attract electrons and give us a usable current, it happens in nature as thunder and lightning, and it happens in batteries.

  How this works though is by disrupting electrons in the object, when you add a strong current to an object like this the covalent bonds (electrons) start to follow with the current, this is how ion lifters work, in fact if you view any credible anti gravity devise you will see they all disrupt the electron flow.

  More importantly you can create an anti gravity field by simple ionisation and heat that do not need strong currents. I have made objects lose weight by removing electrons and adding heat.

  If any one would like to try this take a battery charger and a stainless steel spoon and put the negative of the battery charger on it and strike it a few times with the positive, leave the negative on for about 15 min, then weigh it again, it will lose weight, you can heat up drained batteries and see weight loss as well as they have some positive ions in them.

  I have also made a 422 gram cathode lose 13 grams well heating on scales because it had some ions attached to it as well.

  They don’t want people to know this information because they know it also provides over unity energy by naturally attracting electrons.

  Again ions are why lighting goes from the ground up. Think if you had a bunch of positive ions in a capacitor and a wire to the ground :) wella you have lightning harnessed.

  Cheers all, feel free to duplicate my experiments and share the information freely as it’s the only way we will ever have it/\.

  It is up to us to do this for our selves as the governments and oil companies will not let us have it.

• [darue]

  old news. I don’t think this thing will even fly.

  The idea of ionizing the air around a craft isn’t new at all. There was talk of using this sort of method to reduce friction and/or get a more perfect laminar flow on conventional aircraft. As well as ‘stealth’ side-effects. Roy’s design here is basically an optimally designed “lifter” (or Ionocraft) isn’t it?

  —-
  general info on Electrohydrodynamic thrusters:
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrohydrodynamic_thruster

  as used in cool new airship designs:
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHRzqlKGZyE
  http://www.aeroscraft.com/

  info on DARPA’s “walrus”

  more on plasma aerodynamics

  here’s a spacecraft version (it has to bring it’s own fluid with it, but it’s a good idea none the less):
  http://www.aip.org/tip/INPHFA/vol-6/iss-5/p16.pdf

• [toxonix]

  You’d need a crapload more electricity than you’re going to be able to produce on a nearly weightless ship.
  All the ion propulsion drives that have been around since the 50s or 60s need fuel. You’re not going to get enough plasma density out of charging thin air to move something around. If you have too much density and charge, you get lightning bolts.
  This is dumb.

• [gwbyrd]

  Why not nuclear power? Hmm, we still haven’t gotten to the belt-sized nuclear fuel packs, have we? What’s the hold-up on that again? Last I checked, there were ‘disposable’ nuclear reactors about the size of a bus…

• [Oren Beck]

  TANSTAAFL. Or the very spicy food’s free and the drinks are small expensive ones. The humor dispensed, let’s look at a reality checking list.
  With some appropriate SF references scattered about.

  Let’s first agree that MarketingMumblings such as “fuel” -insulating Vs conducting etc are to be held as Typo instead of the tech itself being slagged for those alone. As the reality checks seem to sink or swim on their own cold equations.

  Ion “Lifters” are a quite real device. With a devoted and intensely passionate fandom of sorts. Even having contests where some folks have shown really impressive demo units. That’s a reality. The rest of reality bats last. As the lift capability to power density ratios are affected by dielectric breakdown of materials AND the AIR that’s being used for reaction mass.

  Then after you lick those presently deal breaking limitations you smack into another set of gotcha’s. Charge “balancing” alone might show how some SF writers were understating the issues of handwavium powered electric lifters. You’ve been kicking googlezillion teragigawatts of electrons into that ion drive’s emitters and sort of forgot that the charges WILL need balancing…

  Charge balance is demonstrated memorably by petting the cat on a dry day or similar mundane “static electric” sparks. Lightning is just the same effect scaled up. The reason I mention spark from finger to cat Vs Lightning bolt is to explain by example the power density ratios.

  The punch line- and it’s a TKO for this saucer concept is that the “rules” work against it. Run these points thru your sanity checks-

  Present ion lifters are in the petted kitty sparks density zone. That’s derived from a search of some webrings of lifter hobby stuff. Which after getting cross eyed on the scaling maths, and being brutally crude in my estimations- It looks to me like this.. and please DO check my math for sanity ok?

  To produce lifts of grams not ounces needs kitty spark power. Lifting ounces is into major destructive lightning bolt current density. Pounds is even more of a nonlinear steep jump. Tons? Maybe with Dick Seaton’s whole bottle of “X” and melting a few church domes for the copper.

• [Tarmle]

  This is quote from my blog (circa 2005, when run-on sentences were in) about a New Scientist piece published in February 1996:

  The article, by Mike Ross, describes a vehicle that is ‘sucked’ into space by an orbital maser array. A pulsed microwave beam is directed to a parabolic reflector on top of the saucer-shaped craft and is focused to a point above it where it forms an expanding plasma from the air, a process known as inverse bremsstrahlung. The idea is that in a moving air stream the resultant parabolic shockwave would create greatly reduced air resistance and would then allow the edge of the compression wave to be accelerated backward by electrodes and superconducting magnets around the craft’s periphery in a drive process called magnetohydrodynamic acceleration.

  It was bad enough when the megawatt maser was pointed out into space [to drive light sails]. If this one gets knocked out of alignment it could really ruin your barbecue.

• [Grisly]

  Did anyone here read Operation Trojan Horse, by John A. Keel?

  A worthwhile read and this “revelation” by an inventor does nothing but remind me of that book.

• [GregLondon]

  mythbusters had something like this in an episode. I think it was cone shaped and used voltage differentials to move air and create lift. It was extremely tiny and lightweight though since the amount of life was miniscule, and the electrical source was provided externally from the device.

• [GregLondon]

  By “tiny” I mean the thing was some kind of toy, maybe a few inches tall and a few inches wide, not tiny as in “carries one mythbuster”.

• [Master of Space and Time]

  Look ! they are already there :

  http://www.mstrfspcndtm.rg/mstrfspcndtm/2008/02/l-vl-ns-ds.html

• [Anonymous]

  It seems like an after-the-fact sort of fun with the heatsink technologies (not least the IBM ones that use ions (at least as a backup) to blow air right onto a chip passivation and/or backside, and to channel hot air out through paired nano(natch)-channels.)
  From that angle, it looks rational and economic, if toylike and inane compared to dye lightpipes to solar cells (a recent MIT pressrelease.)

  It sounds like safe/fun/clean/efficient stuff if only we get 200mW heatsink fans that never dust up (TiO2 makes CO2 out of things though; someone develop a photocatalyst that exhausts cabernet or flavinoids or chilled vodka) and exhausts right over to the return-air duct…or appropriate side of an open window.

  From there to planet-hopping, cow-modding, tractor-beaming, mind-reiserfscking, infrasound-blasting, terraforming shapeshifters, though; global love must stick better to the details.

  This reminds of the _Niea: Sub-Sevens_ episode where NieA gets her hoover-powered saucer launched and flying by using the 440V line…and a cord….
  -sn

• [pesguy]

  Isn’t an insulator the OPPOSITE of a conducter? Who wrote this and who are they trying to fool?

• [HunterZ]

  A couple of people have already pointed it out, but the following statement is an oxymoron and it drove me nuts enough that I had to point it out a 3rd time:
  

  He anticipates that the craft’s body will be made from a material that is an insulator such as ceramic, which is light and a good conductor of electricity.

  Insulation and conductivity are opposing properties!

• [Guesstimate Jones]

  I was alluding to semiconductors, of course…

  And now that I think about, superconductors, too…

• [PFlint]

  Even if it works, forget about it.

  “Flying cars” are certain doom. The guy who would cut you off from the left will now cut you off from beneath! New meaning to the phrase, “I didn’t see him coming.”

  We can’t handle driving in two dimensions, much less three.

• [hectorinwa]

  Isn’t that kind of like saying that cars use tires as fuel? Sound more like the plan is to use electricity as fuel…