[Music] this video is sponsored by betterhelp look the cat is kind of out of the bag ionic thrust is quickly emerging as a viable form of propulsion it's successfully been used for space applications for decades and MIT launched an ionic thrust airplane in 2018 my work though different has paralleled mit's attempts and we're all rushing towards an ionic thrust airplane of commercial design through plasma Channel I've explored two Avenues to bring ionic thrust airplanes closer to reality one being modular ionic thrusters and two I made an actual ionic thrust Wing I'll link the videos down below I started with a rough prototype I called the BSI Thruster with a Max output of 2. 3 m/s improving from that platform was the Mark I which moved four times the volume of air at just under 4 m a second both of these thrusters used a sequential design meaning the same column of air was electrified and accelerated over and over throughout the building and testing of both those thrusters it became clear to me that a purely sequential design has its limitations because a column of air can really only be accelerated so much well during a hike one day nature roundhoused me in the face with a solid reminder leaves use convergence with their veins and are optimized to accumulate sugar into one Central flow walking along the water later that day nature hit me again waves constructive interference another reminder of convergence a really beautiful example of one they made made me wonder perhaps ionic thrust could benefit from a purely convergent approach as well where no column of air is accelerated twice it seemed simple enough in theory after a 6- we Rabbit Hole of Designing building testing modifying and 3D printing plus a shocking amount of bean water I stumbled across an entirely new type of ionic Thruster one which is hollow and relies on peripheral acceleration [Music] so my last rendition of an ionic Thruster was really well received not just online but also in person last year I attended Open sauce to meet fans and I brought along my builds including the Thruster I held down a booth presence on the floor and honestly it was swamped with thousands of people wanting to see the Thruster in person by the way I'm going to open sauce again this year and I'll give more details at the end of the video with all of the attention this Thruster received I took a critical look at the design and Iz there was a lot of room for improvement namely method of acceleration structural integrity and obstacle collision avoidance I'll start with that first one firstly while sequential acceleration worked well on the Mark I it did use some peripheral intake this provided really cool visuals of air flow because most of the flow was coming in from the front but here's the issue the first stage required 40 watts and resulted in 2. 1 m/s think about this after that stage the air is already moving close to the max speed that 40 WTS would result in so hitting stage two with identical power the air is only accelerated to about 3.
2 m/ second a 50% gain moving on to the last stage the air interacts with another 40 watts of power and moves close to 4 m a second only a 25% increase this represents diminishing returns the velocity increases to begin with were likely just from additional air inputs from the side compressing the column of air combined with a little extra boost from the additional power so that's the first one second is structural Integrity the positive electrode is composed of super fragile wire like it hurts me to do this but entire Thruster no longer functional just one wire breaking and the entire Thruster is kaputo it couldn't take a bird strike littleone a single finger strike so that leads me to the next Improvement to be had which is obstacle collision avoidance even ignoring the fragile wire the electrical grounds Traverse the entire inside so nothing can pass through this Thruster period the BSI Mark II design is effective but self-limiting to design an ionic Thruster that can take real world abuse I needed massive improvements full peripheral acceleration no thin wires and no obstructions this means a new topology and that design may have just been waiting to be picked up right here from [Music] nature so last year I designed an ionic thrust Wing the individual thrusters on those wings were pretty much designed to take a hit so they were the perfect blueprint to work off [Music] [Applause] of so the razors on the bottom right there that's the high voltage positive and the Streamline tubing up top that is the electrical ground there's three of the grounds that'll be wired all together so essentially it'll be two high voltage positives that feed into one unified ground so I'm really curious to see how this works Let's test it to minimize variables I used the same power source from the wing which outputs a meager 30,000 volts provided this power the wings thrusters were capable of 1. 5 to 1. 8 m/s providing the same power to the new design I had High Hopes it feels stronger let's see what constructive interference does that's a big Improvement being me I immediately wanted to see the airflow using dry ice it's always interesting to see it visualized a I love how focused that stream is man it's way more interesting on its side but interesting doesn't make a plane fly so back to the drawing board I extended the distance between the electrodes by 4 mm which would allow for a higher voltage input and therefore faster acceleration of air which I then ran test for so right away it's actually a lot quieter and it does feel stronger but it's way way quieter what does the meter say crossing my fingers back to the dry ice and you can see the change in velocity pretty clearly which also showed something really fascinating now that's a really cool effect as air flowed out of the Thruster you can see a separate column of air being sucked into the side of the Thruster it's really cool it was good progress so far but I felt like this design could definitely be pushed further and ultimately I wanted to move a greater volume of air so I widened the output and added longer grounds to reduce turbulence in addition to lengthening the grounds I also increased the width of the output nozzle by about a millimeter so now it's pumping out a wider column of air so if this iteration performs better than past iterations we should see identical or hopefully better velocity output but now it's a wider column of air so it's it's actually pumping out more air this design is pretty much optimized so let's see what it can do come on come 1.
9 2. 5 2. 6 that ladies and gentlemen is 2.
7 2. 7 was enough to nearly put out my propane torch or at least show The airf Flow In a Different Light so after a few more iterations with each of them having their own Advantage I settled on a design that pumps out 3. 1 m/s with a column of air that's 50% wider than the previous iteration in summary model 1A produced 2.
1 M or 1. 4 l/ second second 1B produced 2. 7 or 1.
8 l/s with progressively wider outputs model 1C produced 2. 7 or 2 l/ second and 1D led to 3. 1 m/s or 3.
1 L per [Music] second the design had reached a point where it was time to go bigger and bigger allowed me to try some of that constructive interference that nature is so kindly reminded me of hopping onto on shaped like usual I sat down for a design sesh initially I stack the design sequentially only to realize I didn't utilize convergence very well so I tried a truly convergent approach which looked more like a torture weapon than a Thruster and eventually found that peripheral placement allowed for both convergence and a hollow center I use on shape for all my projects and I'll leave a link down below so you can try it for yourself anyways off to the printer it went normally this is a 24-hour print but with the new Mark 4 only 15 hell yeah prusa still plenty of time though to talk about this video sponsor look life is a beautiful thing and unless you spend your entire day sleeping on a window sill blue can sometimes be filled with moments where it would be nice to have somebody to talk to and that's where better help comes in handy it's a service which connects you up with a licensed therapist who's trained to listen and give you helpful unbiased advice I tried it myself and attempted to trick the therapist into giving me a biased response she actually stayed completely neutral which is awesome so here's how it works first visit betterhelp. com after filling in a bit of information about yourself and why you'd like someone to talk to better help searches for therapists who fit your needs usually within 48 hours you'll be matched with a professional who has years of experience helping people with the topics you selected you can access your therapist from both your phone and computer with a phone call video chat or messaging and best of all you can schedule a session at a time that works for you let better help connect you with a therapist all from the comfort of your own home go to betterhelp. com plasma or choose plasma Channel at checkout to get a special discount on your first month all right this was my first time trying organic tree supports and they just looked really cool on my print after admiring the supports for a bit I got straight to [Music] work it took a bit of work but I present to you the first stage it's such a crazy mesh of geometry and physics that technically a lot could go wrong the moment I give it power but I did so much testing on the individual thrusters themselves that I don't foresee any true issues popping up now when it comes to Performance I do have one projection each of the sides are angled at 22° and air columns will begin converging about 3 cm Downstream and about 10 cm out the air columns should fully converge in a constructive manner forcing the air straight with this convergent design being three times the size of the individual thrusters it would require three times the power to power it makes sense right so I wired up three of the high voltage modules in parallel and ran some tests here's giving it about 50% power 2.
2 2. 3 that's a pretty good start and here's giving it about 3/4 27 28 3 I'm pretty pretty happy with 3 right now consider this this single stage is 30% more powerful than the original mark1 Thruster which only outputs 2. 3 m/ second I wanted to see this Thruster put together which meant two more stages and a bit of acrylic to tie it together [Music] [Applause] with it assembled it looks damn cool you have to admit it has a hollow center which is an intentional feature I'll talk about later and it's just like it's so structurally solid which is an intentional feature of it um now I still need to figure out the individual spacing between the stages for optimal thrust and that'll be the first set of tests coming up for power I use the same inverter from the mark 2 Thruster which feeds into a custom flyback then into a voltage multiplier four stages long outputting approximately 60 KT with the addition of a bit more acrylic flare I connected the negative and positive to power placed spacing at 2 cm and provided 75 watts of power this is the moment of Faith man they're all put together what you giving me we're getting at 2.
8 okay about 2. 8 m/ second I'll take that I then moved on to 1 cm spacing it's such a small change I'm not really sure if it'll make a difference it still sounds really angry yeah still 2. 7 2.
8 finally no spacing between stages and without any spacing between the stages 28 29 so a Mild improvement I guess really really Mild improvement not going to lie I was a bit shocked by that result I mean this design relies on 100% peripheral input and any gaps on the side just introduced drag so I thought slamming the stages together with zero spacing would lead to a higher performance increase and it didn't I don't know science isn't perfect science with spacing optimized I moved on to testing different power levels bumping it to 130 Watts sitting at 3. 4 33 34 that's a pretty decent increase next bumping it to 150 watts provided further increases dude this is getting up there 37 okay we've got 3.
