For space travel, check out this low power thrust
system using microwaves. This sounds suprisingly like
Leonard Dorsetts 'Super Steam' experiments that he was
using to drive a Tesla Turbine. Leonard said he had
several hundred applications for super steam including
fighting fires.
The beauty of it would be a backpack with the
generator, a water container and just snuff fire
wherever you walked....totally cool...
Wonder if this could produce the same effect but
without all the complexity of the super steam rig????
I'll pass it on to Leonard. Check out;
http://unisci.com/stories/19994/1018995.htm
Penn State engineers have miniaturized a satellite
propulsion system they originally built with parts
from a microwave oven to produce a new thruster that
draws only as much electricity as a light bulb, but
puts out more thrust than any system in its class.
Only 2 inches long and 1.25 inches in diameter, the
new mini-thruster depends on a microwave generator
used in weather radar, aircraft radios and other
communications applications (not the larger kitchen
oven magnetron used in the earlier prototype.)
Performance tested under simulated space vacuum
conditions using as little as 80 Watts of power, the
new mini-thruster produced the highest thrust for a
continuously-operating low power electrothermal
thruster.
The thruster concept is based on the fact that
microwaves can be used to create and maintain a
free-floating plasma or superheated, electrically
charged gas within a cavity, Micci says.
If a cold "propellant" gas is passed through or around
the hot plasma in the cavity, the cold gas will become
heated and create thrust when allowed to flow out
through a nozzle.
Since the plasma creates temperatures higher than
those possible by chemical combustion, the plasma
creates more thrust from the same amount of cold
"propellant" gas than chemical combustion, notes the
Penn State engineer.
In recent tests, Micci operated the system using
nitrogen, helium and ammonia as propellant gases. The
thruster can also potentially be operated with water
as propellant.
By means of spectroscopy, the helium velocity at the
nozzle exit was found to be about 13,000 meters per
second. That is the highest measured specific impulse
for a continuously operating low power electrothermal
thruster.
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as I am writing from my work email of
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