EM Drive Developments - related to space flight applications - Thread 8

[WarpTech]

The easiest way to get the vector potential "A" is through E = -dA/dt. We know what "E" is, so "A" will be the negative integral of E*dt. "A" will be circles around the z-axis with amplitude A ~ E/w. There is no need for the inverse-curl(B).

If you have the surface force density vector N/m², and the surface loss density (Watts/m²) these numbers would be of interest.

Is there any way to calculate decay time at each post on the surface?

In the EM equation we have (1/c²) x Watts/Coulomb
In the GEM equation we have (1/c²) x Watts/kg

I expect that  X = Omega/sqrt(4pi*G*e0), but my thoughts are along the lines that at 2.4GHz, the kinetic energy of the electric charge in a magnetic field greatly increases its kg/C, versus the at-rest inverse charge to mass rate of the electrons. Thereby resulting in a stronger GEM force.

I'm still working on these ideas. Any help or criticism is appreciated.

Ahh okay, once I get the vector potential "A" what can I do with it? What does the magnetic vector potential conceptually mean?

I'll see what the surface force density vector and surface loss density look like for EW TM212 cavity tomorrow (unless you have another cavity in mind).

What do you mean by "decay time at each post"? Perhaps the time rate of change of the field at a particular set of positions?

Are you saying that electrons are gaining kinetic energy due to the magnetic field and distributing their asymmetric momentum to the cavity? So what happens if we increase the electron number density to that of an Argon plasma?

The magnetic vector potential "A" can be thought of in many ways! It is the magnetic flux per meter. It represents the magnetic flux contained within the boundary of a current loop. Inside that loop, magnetic flux is either entering or exiting, or reversing direction, depending on the applied voltage. However you want to think of it, "A" is just a good measure of the flux parallel to the z axis. The flux is nothing but photons. In QM <A*A> is just the number of photons. Operate with the energy operator and you get the frequency. The gradients of "A" are the source-free EM field. You can do anything you can do with E & B! It avoids the use of tensors and is a more intuitive way to look at EM fields. (for me anyway)

I meant "Decay time at each point", spell checker messed that one up. We know the force per unit area is equal to the energy density. What I want to know is how quickly does it decay as a function of the geometry. In other words, does the energy and force dissipate faster on the big end, or the small end, or the side walls? At what rate?

Your last question is an interesting idea, but I have no idea if that's true or not. My conjecture at this point is simply that due to voltage drop in the copper, magnetic flux escapes the cavity "into the copper" and that is enough to create divergence. It is unlikely that it escapes all the way through the copper, skin effects would tell us that's not possible.   

[xyzzy]

Hey, not so fast. The incident with the tuner and the re-tuning difficulties was actually mentioned. See page 8 of the published paper. Paul did not make a full length treatise out of it, but he did explain it at least in brief.

P.S. Paul had to repeat an ambient pressure pre-test because of the tuning mishap and he provided the graphs of both runs next to each other in the paper for comparison.

[Bob Woods]

"Yup. At the time he was a federally funded employee who made the sin of omission of a major error of experimental protocol. Bad science. Bad, bad science. Smack that nose!!! Kudos to him for fessing up. We have all learned."

I, for one, don't think that tone is constructive. A little more civility and gentleness can breed mutual trust and collaboration. The world needs a hell of a lot of that these days.

[kaublezw]

Interesting that electrons have the ability to gain mass in a magnetic field.

http://phys.org/news/2016-08-electrons-mass-presence-high-magnetic.html#jCp

My Best,
Shell

Yup.. I've been saying this for years (decades?). The observed mass of an electron is mostly due to induction.

Warptech,
Are you familiar with the work of Halton Arp, specifically his proposal that Quasars' red shifts do not indicate distance, but are intrinsic in nature.  He suggests that quasars consist of young matter with little or no mass born from mature galaxies.  As they age their mass increases (in discrete steps) until they develop into companion galaxies.   I just thought it might relate to your theory.

[birchoff]

Is it me or does this seem to happen a lot; I am referring specifically to accusations being thrown around that make no sense if you actually read the source material being quoted.

[rfmwguy]

On a positive note, Univ of Arizona put together a nice article regarding emdrive with commentary from respected scientists: http://www.wildcat.arizona.edu/article/2016/11/ua-experts-weigh-in-on-nasas-em-drive

[VAXHeadroom]

Interesting that electrons have the ability to gain mass in a magnetic field.

http://phys.org/news/2016-08-electrons-mass-presence-high-magnetic.html#jCp

My Best,
Shell

Yup.. I've been saying this for years (decades?). The observed mass of an electron is mostly due to induction.

Warptech,
Are you familiar with the work of Halton Arp, specifically his proposal that Quasars' red shifts do not indicate distance, but are intrinsic in nature.  He suggests that quasars consist of young matter with little or no mass born from mature galaxies.  As they age their mass increases (in discrete steps) until they develop into companion galaxies.   I just thought it might relate to your theory.

The work of Harold Aspden also showed that red shift was intrinsic to the electron energy level.  He postulated 5 energy levels - we are in the 2nd highest, so 60% of the universe appears redshifted, 20% appears blueshifted, and 10% is unshifted.  He abhored GR and derived E=Mc^2 from first principles without tensors (among other things).  Unfortunately I believe his website is no defunct...well...some of it is still up there... http://www.haroldaspden.com/  He would have loved this forum

[therealjjj77]

Have any of the tests on EMDrive been performed with maintaining a vacuum inside of the frustrum?

This is an excellent question. If the EW test under vacuum did indeed vent the frustum to its external environment, there must have been a vent allowing it to do so, whether intentional or not. Did this vent exist? If it did, what was the effect of this hole on the Q of the frustum? If it did not, what was the effect of the frustum expansion as its internal 1 atmosphere was exposed to external vacuum outside the frustum? Could the phase locked loop deal with this probably severe cavity distortion? If it could do so, could it maintain phase lock under mode shift? If so, what are the use of the results?

The results of these experiments should NOT be thrust versus frequency, thrust versus Q, thrust versus mode. They should be thrust versus input power based upon ONE of the above. Expected result versus controlled input. To date, absolutely no-one has done this.

As many others on this forum have suggested (including myself), a kilowatt is a kilowatt is a kilowatt. A resistive heater within the frustum dissipating the same energy would go a long way to answering quite a few of the thermal issues.

Would be intriguing to see how a vacuum inside the frustrum would affect performance considering that such a drive could easily operate in a vacuum in application(since it's intended use is in space). 

Would also be intriguing to see if it would be possible to utilize(and filter if necessary) the already existing AMPLE background radiation in space to power this. Tapping that would be like running a cruise liner in a sea of diesel fuel.

All:

The EW copper frustum was radially vented along the entire perimeter of both the big OD and small OD ends of the frustum, so any vented gas's momentum would be cancelled out.  Thus all the copper frustum tests run in an ambient vacuum also had near the same vacuum level in the frustum itself.  I also made sure that all venting was completed before running any tests and since it took hours to reach the desired vacuum levels of less than ~5x10^-5 Torr, all venting activities were long gone before testing started.

Best,

Thanks for that clarification. Was reviewing the wiki data and it looks as though the team was using the same frequency as when testing in an ambient atmosphere. However, you may then need to recallibrate the frequency for optimal performance in a vacuum. This is because the wavelength is longer in a vacuum then air.

http://www.rpi.edu/dept/phys/Dept2/APPhys1/optics/optics/node7.html

Reading back through my response, it may not have come across as intended. That's what I get for writing responses at 2AM. :-)

Want to say that I admire the work you guys do. There are a lot of variables involved and just as many critics.

My post better worded: Did your team have a chance to try other frequencies while testing in a vacuum? Or did you find that 1.9371 GHz was the optimum frequency?

Reference: http://emdrive.wiki/Experimental_Results

[OnlyMe]

...
Shawyer's theory is just a theory, a paper, there are lots of other theories, that doesn't make them bad or good they just may have flaws.
...

What makes some of them really bad is the obstinacy displayed at improving the "theory" which is still frozen in time, particularly when there has been universal criticism of many aspects of it like its claim that there is no pressure on the side walls of an electromagneticaly resonant truncated conical cavity, inability to present a self-consistent free-body-diagram of forces, and the claim that an electromagnetic cavity can self-accelerate simply based on Special Relativity, Maxwell's equations and Newton's laws, and that nothing else needs to be taken into account.  And that he keeps repeating this after 16 years.

Compare this with a good theory: Einstein's paper on the Special Theory of Relativity was followed, 11 years afterwards by his General Theory of Relativity. Einstein did not need any criticism to improve his theory: it was self-motivated.

What is really wrong is not just to present a theory that can be shown to be flawed.  What is really wrong is to keep insisting on the same old flawed theory after decades of criticism and the lack of improvement of this wrong theory.  All the greatest scientists made mistakes, so did Einstein and Feynmann.  The difference is that they corrected themselves and they continuously improved their models of the Universe.

"The obstinacy of human beings is exceeded only by the obstinacy of inanimate objects"  Alexander Chase

Obstinacy on a chosen individual particular path, and unwillingness to improve it should not be confused with obstinacy in pursuing a goal. 

...

Compare this with a good theory: Einstein's paper on the Special Theory of Relativity was followed, 11 years afterwards by his General Theory of Relativity. Einstein did not need any criticism to improve his theory: it was self-motivated.

Dr. Rodal, General relativity (GR) is not just an improvement on the special theory of relativity (SR). They are really two different theories, that happen to share an author and the word relativity. The fact that SR remains valid where the tidal effects of gravitation either do not exist or can be ignored as insignificant, or probably more accurately unmeasurable, does not make GR, a theory of gravitation, an evolutionary improvement on (of) SR, which does not even attempt to address gravitation.

Stating that Einstein did not need criticism to improve his theory, is similar to saying that after inventing a knife, the invention of a fork was an improvement, on the knife.., and the spoon then an improvement on a fork.

GR as an improvement on Newtonian dynamics would have been an accurate comparison/example. Both are theories describing, what we can observe of gravitation.

OnlyMe, I strongly disagree with your very narrow view of Einstein's goals, as if he was just interested in very limited aspects of Nature, your spoon and forks view of Einstein's modeling of the Universe.  Special Relativity was just an early effort of Einstein's goal of explaining the Universe.  As a matter of fact this goal did not at all stop with his theory of General Relativity (which is called General Relativity because it generalizes Special Relativity, by providing a unified description of gravity as a geometric property of spacetime) but continued until his death with his effort at a Unified Theory of the Universe which was Einstein's goal.

Unfortunately, you did not not get the point of not confusing a path with the goal.  Einstein's goal was to explain and model our Universe and not simply on "improving Newtonian dynamics" or improving on the relationship between space and time.  No, it was not a question of spoon and forks 

Again,

Obstinacy on a chosen individual particular path, and unwillingness to improve it should not be confused with obstinacy in pursuing a goal.

I presume that Shawyer's goal is to enable a propellant-less drive .  The electromagnetically resonant truncated copper cone is just a means to that end.  His theory is a particular path to that end.

Stating  that there is no pressure on the side walls of an electromagneticaly resonant truncated conical cavity is actually a dead end.  I am surprised that he has not yet acknowledged this and come up with a more realistic model.

Dr. Rodal, you seem to have read a great deal more into my post or what you believe my intent was, than I intended. Even more than I see in what I wrote when I re-read my own words.

Granted I was nit picking.., i just do not believe your statement suggesting that GR was in some way a natural extension or evolution or ..., improvemt on SR is accurate.., though what I believe your general intent to be, was or is accurate.

The spoon and fork was just an exaggeration of the fact that after publishing SR, which did not even begin to try to describe gravity, Einstein undertook the task of doing just that, developing a geometric description of the tidal effects of gravitation. They are two separate undertakings describing different aspects of nature.

I added the comparison of GR and Newton's work only because, in that comparison there exists a literal connection of one theory being an improvement on the earlier, both adddressing the same observable aspect of nature, gravity...

In retrospect, I should have been clearer, probably even here in this post...

I do understand the intent of your earlier post, or believe I do, and did not make that clear. Just as I obviously did not make it clear that my only nit picking point was that even though GR followed SR, GR represented a description of the world and nature that SR did not even begin to acknowledge.

EDIT P.S. I have no issues with your assessment of Shawyer's theory...

[Choice777]

Why does every article out there keeps calling it "NASA's em drive"  when  NASA didn't even want to touch it with a barge pole for almost 2 decades?  They and everyone in the science world kept looking down their noses at it and calling it crackpot  and fringe science?
Now NASA thinks it can claim it as theirs? Really?

[TheTraveller]

Same frustum, same frustum orientation on torsion pendulum, should be same Lorentz force, sort of the same frustum heating.

Yet without the dielectric at the small end, the measured force is much larger and the direction reverses, small to big.

Dielectric 1st attachment. (2.0mN/kW, big to small)
Non dielectric 2nd attachment. (3.85mN/kW, small to big)

Note the force direction arrows on the images.

Please explain how Lorentz and thermal heating reverses the force direction and taking out the dielectric increases the measured force magnitude?

To me this is the smoking gun.

BTW Roger and I measured the same non dielectric static force generation direction as did NASA, small to big, which really causes problems for almost all the theories.

[Star One]

Why does every article out there keeps calling it "NASA's em drive"  when  NASA didn't even want to touch it with a barge pole for almost 2 decades?  They and everyone in the science world kept looking down their noses at it and calling it crackpot  and fringe science?
Now NASA thinks it can claim it as theirs? Really?

What the media seems to think here does not equate to what NASA probably thinks, as much as it has any kind of overall thought on it, which it probably doesn't.

[TheTraveller]

Why does every article out there keeps calling it "NASA's em drive"  when  NASA didn't even want to touch it with a barge pole for almost 2 decades?  They and everyone in the science world kept looking down their noses at it and calling it crackpot  and fringe science?
Now NASA thinks it can claim it as theirs? Really?

What the media seems to think here does not equate to what NASA probably thinks, as much as it has any kind of overall thought on it, which it probably doesn't.

All truth passes through three stages.

First, it is ridiculed.
Second, it is violently opposed.
Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

Arthur Schopenhauer

[TheTraveller]

Gilo Cardozo talks about a transportation future that will blow us away and forever change transportation.
https://betterworkingworld.ey.com/purpose/passion-lead-purpose (watch the video)

Interesting Gilo is in a JV with SPR/Roger Shawyer to commercialise his EmDrive and according to Roger working to demo a wingless and propless drone in 2017.

Is Gilo giving us a taste of what is to come in a EmDrive driven transportation future?

Build a VTVL aircraft at less cost than a helicopter? Wonder what that may be? EmDrive powered drone?

No noise aircraft? Yup for sure EmDrive powered.

Explaining what the future holds for aviation, Gilo compares it to the horse and cart. In the 1900s, no one could imagine today’s world where millions of cars travel safely around the planet. Gilo believes that’s what it will be like for us with the aircraft of the future: "We burn through 100 tons of fuel to fly 200 people from here to Hong Kong – it's insane how much fuel we're burning, and I think there's just so much room for improvement. Yes, we accept it as the status quo, and it is amazing technology we use today, but it's nothing compared with where we're going."

[Willem Staal]

Same frustum, same frustum orientation on torsion pendulum, should be same Lorentz force, sort of the same frustum heating.

Yet without the dielectric at the small end, the measured force is much larger and the direction reverses, small to big.

Dielectric 1st attachment. (2.0mN/kW, big to small)
Non dielectric 2nd attachment. (3.85mN/kW, small to big)

Note the force direction arrows on the images.

Please explain how Lorentz and thermal heating reverses the force direction and taking out the dielectric increases the measured force magnitude?

To me this is the smoking gun.

BTW Roger and I measured the same non dielectric static force generation direction as did NASA, small to big, which really causes problems for almost all the theories.

What kind of dielectric do you use?

As the EM drive works with with high powers you might get at some point a dielectric breakdown and this could damage the effect or even the dielectric component.

I recommend glimmer as dielectric .

[TheTraveller]

Same frustum, same frustum orientation on torsion pendulum, should be same Lorentz force, sort of the same frustum heating.

Yet without the dielectric at the small end, the measured force is much larger and the direction reverses, small to big.

Dielectric 1st attachment. (2.0mN/kW, big to small)
Non dielectric 2nd attachment. (3.85mN/kW, small to big)

Note the force direction arrows on the images.

Please explain how Lorentz and thermal heating reverses the force direction and taking out the dielectric increases the measured force magnitude?

To me this is the smoking gun.

BTW Roger and I measured the same non dielectric static force generation direction as did NASA, small to big, which really causes problems for almost all the theories.

What kind of dielectric do you use?

As the EM drive works with with high powers you might get at some point a dielectric breakdown and this could damage the effect or even the dielectric component.

I recommend glimmer as dielectric .

SPR/Roger Shawyer stopped using dielectrics in 2003 and I have never used a dielectric. He stated they introduced losses, reducing Q and force generation. NASA tests showed that was correct.

We can see it the NASA test, the force generated with a dielectric (2.0mN/kW) was much lower than the force generated without the dielectric (3.85mN/kW).

More importantly the force direction reversal supports Roger's radiation pressure theory as the end of the EmDrive with the shortest 1/2 guide wavelength (higher radiation pressure) was where the force was directed to as attached.

Shows thrust direction is the function of standing EM wave geometry, not the EMDrive geometry.

According to radiation pressure theory, the end plate with the shortest 1/2 wave will have the highest radiation pressure and thus the force will be directed to that end plate as shown.

As the force direction reversed by just removing the dielectric and doing nothing else, the force direction change rules out Lorentz force which would not swap as the wiring was not changed.

[rfmwguy]

Why does every article out there keeps calling it "NASA's em drive"  when  NASA didn't even want to touch it with a barge pole for almost 2 decades?  They and everyone in the science world kept looking down their noses at it and calling it crackpot  and fringe science?
Now NASA thinks it can claim it as theirs? Really?

NAsa's name gives it credence in articles as opposed to DIY names. Unfortunately NASA barely funded the research, far less than the popsci media probably realizes. Paul Kocyla is next in line is my guess as he is making good progress with a redesign of his miniemdrive that he is working on with Dr Tajmar of Dresden University. If all goes well it may become the first space trial of an emdrive:

https://hackaday.io/project/10166-flying-an-emdrive

[PotomacNeuron]

Why does every article out there keeps calling it "NASA's em drive"  when  NASA didn't even want to touch it with a barge pole for almost 2 decades?  They and everyone in the science world kept looking down their noses at it and calling it crackpot  and fringe science?
Now NASA thinks it can claim it as theirs? Really?

It is the media who emphasize the prefix "NASA's" to EmDrive. I do not think NASA wants its name to be associated with EmDrive. On the opposite to your impression, mine is that NASA will make announcement to keep itself away from EmDrive soon.

[Willem Staal]

I once read a old story from the  philips incandescent licht bulb company's NATLAB.

They enhanced the performance of these lightbulbs by filling them with argon gas.

I don't know what kind of gas is added into the frustrum (maybe just air) , but some tests with (inert) gas filled frustrums would be very interesting, and might get surprising results.

[rfmwguy]

I once read a old story from the  philips incandescent licht bulb company's NATLAB.

They enhanced the performance of these lightbulbs by filling them with argon gas.

I don't know what kind of gas is added into the frustrum (maybe just air) , but some tests with (inert) gas filled frustrums would be very interesting, and might get surprising results.

There is a patent applied for using ammonia gas:

https://www.reddit.com/r/EmDrive/comments/5fa7qa/patent_application_filed_for_em_drive_using/