Cuddihy:"Clearly you all are on the right track with first proving the theory, then worry about the practical engineering."What would you consider a convincing proof of principle test of the M-E? Woodward's 2009 rotary data appears to be convincing to those who understand the experiment and the pitfalls of same, (the electrostriction issue), but I think an uninitiated scientist could have heart burn with it.
Quote from: Star-Drive on 10/02/2009 12:04 pmCuddihy:"Clearly you all are on the right track with first proving the theory, then worry about the practical engineering."What would you consider a convincing proof of principle test of the M-E? Woodward's 2009 rotary data appears to be convincing to those who understand the experiment and the pitfalls of same, (the electrostriction issue), but I think an uninitiated scientist could have heart burn with it.Oh, levitation in a vacuum chamber should do it.
Why would a levitator need to be battery powered? As long as it is clearly not being supported by the power cables.One that has identical performance in air & in a vacuum ( to discount ion wind) would be convincing.
Ion engines will work inside a Faraday cage. It only blocks fields from outside. You really want a vacuum chamber to be sure.
2D travel over an air hockey table isn't enough?
Tom & Crew:Goods points all and yes the most convincing M-E demonstration would be to levitate a self-contained/battery powered MLT or M-E rotary test article under remote RF or IR control into the conference room, land it, take off several times and then float it out in say a five minute time period. However our current level of mastery of the M-E is not up to this levitating task yet, so Tom's torque pendulum or ~2 meter ballistics pendulum will probably have to do for a display mechanics for the next generation M-E test articles. And I assume that we would also have to be able to generate a high enough thrust to weight ratio in the test article so it can push itself at least a couple of inches off the pendulum's null or at rest position for the duration of the power pulse to the MLT before we could convince anyone we weren't just dealing with wishful thinking. Now if we insist on a self contained and remote controlled test article needed to rule out a number of false positive candidate effects, I don't see a battery powered MLT test article coming in at less than 500-to-1,000 grams depending on the required drive electronics and its cooling requirements. With that kind of test article mass, we will need at least 0.1 Newton (~10 gram-force) of thrust to get that much deflection on a 2-meter pendulum. I think that could be doable with existing High-K caps being run at say 14 MHz and a few hundred volts peak on the cap-ring, or use Low-K caps if we push the frequency up to 28 MHz and its cap-ring voltage up to at least 10kV-p. However, we still need to get the MLT's cap-ring bulk acceleration levels for either case up into the 100s of gees at the same time and that may take some very creative engineering and resources to accomplish, especially for the MLT. BTW, I found out last weekend that my 52 MHz MLT-2009 PTFE test article that I had reported on earlier this year on this forum turned out to be a real dud. That is because of all its as-built parasitic capacitances and resulting losses that are killing off the counted on resonant behavior needed to reach the high voltages required to express the M-E in a Low-K PTFE cap-ring using my power limited 100W, 52 MHz RF supply. It looks like I will have to lower its operating frequency and/or rebuild the MLT core to mitigate these parasitic losses before I can get up the high operating voltages I need to see any M-E effects. And that is assuming I have the bulk acceleration problem solved in this test article, which is a big IF.
In a like manner an ion wind lifter will kill its lift if you put it in a small enough box that creates a recirculating air mass flow that kills its lift.
If you had a big capacitor without dielectric (vacuum), obviously you couldn't put as much power through it, but electrostriction goes away, permeability is no longer an issue, voltage can be arbitrarily high,etc.I mean the power issue alone makes it no go for useful purposes, but for measurement, why doesn't this work?
Quote from: Star-Drive on 10/04/2009 05:29 pmIn a like manner an ion wind lifter will kill its lift if you put it in a small enough box that creates a recirculating air mass flow that kills its lift.Okay, but it won't kill ALL lift, and you've got to convince reviewers that they're seeing a really exotic physical effect instead of a mundane one they already know is present.Quote from: cuddihy on 10/05/2009 04:05 amIf you had a big capacitor without dielectric (vacuum), obviously you couldn't put as much power through it, but electrostriction goes away, permeability is no longer an issue, voltage can be arbitrarily high,etc.I mean the power issue alone makes it no go for useful purposes, but for measurement, why doesn't this work?If I'm not mistaken, the device needs to operate on the atoms in the dielectric in order to oscillate their mass. If there isn't a dielectric, there's nothing to oscillate.
Quote from: Lampyridae on 09/30/2009 04:24 amQuote from: cuddihy on 09/30/2009 02:40 amQuote from: Star-Drive on 09/29/2009 03:21 amQuote from: Robotbeat on 09/28/2009 06:27 pmYou know, these conversion factors don't really matter when we're nonchalantly throwing out improvements of three orders of magnitude.Isn't it 4 orders of magnitude over what has been demonstrated?And that actually puts it currently into the "less technically certain than the space elevator" column, as that only requires a 2 order of magnitude improvement in demonstrated materiel properties like tensile strength.Anyway, it does seem kind of premature to assume that expending lots of resources in the direction of capacitor research could necessarily produce these results.You haven't been looking at the equations? The chief gain is not from boosting cap K, it's from increasing the frequency of the driver to above the MHz range, refining it and getting the kinks out.Actually if one could come up with a dielectric with a WELL BALANCED set of cap dielectric parameters for the M-E MLTs, like a relative permittivity of ~1,000, a magnetic permeability of ~20, a well controlled piezoelectric response, a dissipation factor of less than 0.5% at 10 MHz in a dielectric that had a 1,000 hour or greater operating lifetime under full power conditions, we would be ready to start building levitating M-E test articles. As noted, nobody in the high energy cap storage business is thinking about this kind of cap parameter mix until we show them it’s worth their time and money to do so. And to do that we first have to make a convincing M-E demonstration using COTS parts and a much more optimized MLT or rotary M-E drive design and that will just take a lot of time (years) using our existing resources.
Quote from: cuddihy on 09/30/2009 02:40 amQuote from: Star-Drive on 09/29/2009 03:21 amQuote from: Robotbeat on 09/28/2009 06:27 pmYou know, these conversion factors don't really matter when we're nonchalantly throwing out improvements of three orders of magnitude.Isn't it 4 orders of magnitude over what has been demonstrated?And that actually puts it currently into the "less technically certain than the space elevator" column, as that only requires a 2 order of magnitude improvement in demonstrated materiel properties like tensile strength.Anyway, it does seem kind of premature to assume that expending lots of resources in the direction of capacitor research could necessarily produce these results.You haven't been looking at the equations? The chief gain is not from boosting cap K, it's from increasing the frequency of the driver to above the MHz range, refining it and getting the kinks out.
Quote from: Star-Drive on 09/29/2009 03:21 amQuote from: Robotbeat on 09/28/2009 06:27 pmYou know, these conversion factors don't really matter when we're nonchalantly throwing out improvements of three orders of magnitude.Isn't it 4 orders of magnitude over what has been demonstrated?And that actually puts it currently into the "less technically certain than the space elevator" column, as that only requires a 2 order of magnitude improvement in demonstrated materiel properties like tensile strength.Anyway, it does seem kind of premature to assume that expending lots of resources in the direction of capacitor research could necessarily produce these results.
Quote from: Robotbeat on 09/28/2009 06:27 pmYou know, these conversion factors don't really matter when we're nonchalantly throwing out improvements of three orders of magnitude.
You know, these conversion factors don't really matter when we're nonchalantly throwing out improvements of three orders of magnitude.
Why would the caps need matter in the dielectric? Energy has mass (as seen in the fact that a proton weighs much more than the sum of its quarks), so a vacuum cap that stores energy would have a mass fluctuation (assuming the Woodwardian theory is correct). Prove to me why this isn't the case!