Skipjack wrote:Heidi Fearn of SSI will be speaking about the Mach Effect work they have been doing with the NIAC grant they received in about 30 minutes from now.
https://livestream.com/viewnow/NIAC2017
Thanks for the link. For those interested, her talk begins at 48:15 in Day 3 Part 2.
Here is what I took from it. There was also a section about a mission to Proxima b Centauri but I'll leave that out.
Their team: Prof. Heidi Rearn (PI), Dr. Jose Rodal, Marshall Eubanks, Dr. Bruce Long, Paul March, Gary Hudson, Emeritus Prof. James F. Woodward (consultant)
They've adopted Dr. Rodal's suggestion to call it the "MEGA" drive (Mach Effect Gravity Assist).
Replications have been performed:
1. Technical University Dresden, Germany (Prof. Martin Tajmar) - conducted at 4 microTorr
2. University of Applied Sciences, Austria (N. Buldrini) - conducted at 2 microTorr
3. A third (unspecified).
New experiments indicate that:
1. Changing the mass of the brass "weight" on the end impacts the results. There is an optimal mass for the system.
2. Dr. Rodal performed a theoretical analysis and their new results (force vs voltage) fall in line with its predictions.
3. Theory predicts that the force generated should be proportional to the voltage to the fourth power. They've collected more data which seems to support this (showed a plotted graph consisting of four groups of data points, fitted curve indicates V^3.79). There's a limit to how much voltage they can apply without melting the PZT stack, so the data points only extend so far up the curve.
Are about to experiment with PIN-PMN-PT (lead indium niobate - lead magnesium niobate - lead titanate) which, being uniformly crystalline, they hope will offer a factor of ten improvement over the sintered PZT powder.
"Multiple possible approaches to increase thrust". End goal: 1N of thrust for each small device, to be used in arrays of 1000 or more.
They'd like to do a rotational test, i.e. spinning a microsatellite up and down by opposing drives.