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posted by Fnord666 on Saturday July 04 2020, @05:44AM   Printer-friendly
from the to-good-to-be-true dept.

This scientist says he's built a jet engine that turns electricity directly into thrust:

This past autumn, a professor at Wuhan University named Jau Tang was hard at work piecing together a thruster prototype that, at first, sounds too good to be true.

The basic idea, he said in an interview, is that his device turns electricity directly into thrust — no fossil fuels required — by using microwaves to energize compressed air into a plasma state and shooting it out like a jet. Tang suggested, without a hint of self-aggrandizement, that it could likely be scaled up enough to fly large commercial passenger planes. Eventually, he says, it might even power spaceships.

Needless to say, these are grandiose claims. A thruster that doesn't require tanks of fuel sounds suspiciously like science fiction — like the jets on Iron Man's suit in the Marvel movies, for instance, or the thrusters that allow Doc Brown's DeLorean to fly in "Back to the Future."

But in Tang's telling, his invention — let's just call it a Tang Jet, which he worked on with Wuhan University collaborators Dan Ye and Jun Li — could have civilization-shifting potential here in the non-fictional world.

"Essentially, the goal of this technology is to try and use electricity and air to replace gasoline," he said. "Global warming is a major threat to human civilization. Fossil fuel-free technology using microwave air plasma could be a solution."

He anticipates this happening fast. In two years, he says, he thinks Tang Jets could power drones. In a decade, he'd like to see them fly a whole airplane.

That would all be awesome, obviously. But it's difficult to evaluate whether Tang's invention could ever scale up enough to become practical. And even if it did, there would be substantial energy requirements that could doom aerospace applications.

One thing's for sure: If the tech works the way he hopes, the world will never be the same.

Journal Reference:
Dan Ye, Jun Li, Jau Tang. Jet propulsion by microwave air plasma in the atmosphere [open], AIP Advances (DOI: 5.0005814)


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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 04 2020, @03:32PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 04 2020, @03:32PM (#1016139)

    It might get more efficient when scaled up. Regular jet engines do. And airplane engines only run at full power for takeoff, if even then. Of course it's still not anywhere near as efficient as it would have to be.

    In space, obviously you would have to bring the reaction mass with you. But that is true for all rockets. But it could potentially replace chemical or ion thrusters for orbital maneuvering, all of which currently require fuel that is some combination of toxic, corrosive, or made of rare chemicals. A thruster that runs on harmless and abundant nitrogen gas might have value even if it doesn't perform quite as well.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 04 2020, @09:43PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 04 2020, @09:43PM (#1016266)

    We need to know how much thrust / force per watt can be produced so that we can compare it to existing technologies. Without numbers how can I tell if it's more efficient or not?