Mach Effect progress
Re: Mach Effect progress
I was wandering if it would be possible to use a arduino as the foundation of my circuit making process for a qvpt/mlt? If done right the system could be made to responded to not only the heating problem that you have mentioned but also be made to respond to other potential problems in the charging and discharging process of the thruster system.
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Re: Mach Effect progress
I suppose that would be possible and you can load Labview into it if you like.
http://sine.ni.com/nips/cds/view/p/lang/en/nid/209835
I would however not recommend an MLT as the b-field is not strong enough and it's very difficult to build a decent preload inside a torus. This is why Jim returned to the previous UFG design, now commonly called a MET, for Mach Effect Thruster.
If you think then you can provide impedance and resonance matching with the controller, seems to me you may have a plausible way to make a very small unit, and even one that would fit aboard a nano-sat for TRL-7 testing.
I'm curious though, what would you use to test it? If you can actually build such a thing and have reason to believe it works, Jim might put it on the ARC Lite for you, or perhaps even Eagleworks would, but without a way to test it, how would you have reason to use someone else's lab?
Honestly, if you think you can design and build an arduino matcher, you might just keep the design a trade secret and offer Jim to test it for you. If it works, patent it.
The trouble with this business is there are just so many parts to the task. If you remove the need to build your own balance, provide your own instrumentation, even build your own thruster, you're much more likely to make headway on a real project.
Let me know if you want to be added to Jim's mailing list. I'm sure he'd correspond with you over how to accomplish whatever you're after.
http://sine.ni.com/nips/cds/view/p/lang/en/nid/209835
I would however not recommend an MLT as the b-field is not strong enough and it's very difficult to build a decent preload inside a torus. This is why Jim returned to the previous UFG design, now commonly called a MET, for Mach Effect Thruster.
If you think then you can provide impedance and resonance matching with the controller, seems to me you may have a plausible way to make a very small unit, and even one that would fit aboard a nano-sat for TRL-7 testing.
I'm curious though, what would you use to test it? If you can actually build such a thing and have reason to believe it works, Jim might put it on the ARC Lite for you, or perhaps even Eagleworks would, but without a way to test it, how would you have reason to use someone else's lab?
Honestly, if you think you can design and build an arduino matcher, you might just keep the design a trade secret and offer Jim to test it for you. If it works, patent it.
The trouble with this business is there are just so many parts to the task. If you remove the need to build your own balance, provide your own instrumentation, even build your own thruster, you're much more likely to make headway on a real project.
Let me know if you want to be added to Jim's mailing list. I'm sure he'd correspond with you over how to accomplish whatever you're after.
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis
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Re: Mach Effect progress
Had a thought. Heating as the device operates should be a very predictable curve. Resonance changes due to heat should therefore be able to be mapped out and accounted for in operating software with a simple look-up table--even without a thermometer on the thruster X amount of operating time should be connected to Y resonance change and thus adjusted for. One more variable eliminated. I'd bet that this is how many commercial thrusters would account for it rather than the fa cry stuff being talked about.
This assumes of course that there is a software control that can change he the frequencies as needed.
I too have had the thought to make my own, but would need explanations far below a B.S. to follow in putting stuff together. I would be making a more fixed design that would not have many of the experimental controls being used in the labs and ideally much more powerful.
This assumes of course that there is a software control that can change he the frequencies as needed.
I too have had the thought to make my own, but would need explanations far below a B.S. to follow in putting stuff together. I would be making a more fixed design that would not have many of the experimental controls being used in the labs and ideally much more powerful.
Evil is evil, no matter how small
Re: Mach Effect progress
The idea i had was to first mount a prototype onto a small RC car and see if it moved and then maybe move to a pendulum if the RC test work out. I was wondering in a MET does the charge and discharge of the coils and capacitors happen at the same time or is there a miniscule delay in the charge discharge rates of the coils compared to the capacitors? Also, would you mind defining what you meant by arduino matcher.
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Re: Mach Effect progress
PLL is not a complex thing for an EE to design and build. As I said, Jim is doing it himself. I'm sure there are many here who could do it and this should adjust so quickly and often that it would appear to never go out of resonance. However we will eventually need to see some heat management go into the designs. I already have two such designs sitting waiting.kunkmiester wrote:Had a thought. Heating as the device operates should be a very predictable curve. Resonance changes due to heat should therefore be able to be mapped out and accounted for in operating software with a simple look-up table--even without a thermometer on the thruster X amount of operating time should be connected to Y resonance change and thus adjusted for. One more variable eliminated. I'd bet that this is how many commercial thrusters would account for it rather than the fa cry stuff being talked about.
For the intrepid:
http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi. ... 024165.pdf
http://www.radio-electronics.com/info/r ... lation.php
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis
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Re: Mach Effect progress
double post
Last edited by GIThruster on Wed Jan 08, 2014 1:05 pm, edited 1 time in total.
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis
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Re: Mach Effect progress
One can only guess at how much thrust is necessary to move a small RC like car but it would likely be thousands of times more than you'll get. Remember, MET's put out uN's of thrust. That's millionths of a Newton. A really good MET can put out mN of thrust, but that is not enough to move an RC car. Contemporary Hall and Ion thrusters would not move an RC car either. Years ago Paul March floated the notion of putting a self-contained MET on an air hockey table and that would likely move, but you will not be able to measure thrust that way so you're very limited as to what you can learn.vnbt4 wrote:The idea i had was to first mount a prototype onto a small RC car and see if it moved and then maybe move to a pendulum if the RC test work out. I was wondering in a MET does the charge and discharge of the coils and capacitors happen at the same time or is there a miniscule delay in the charge discharge rates of the coils compared to the capacitors? Also, would you mind defining what you meant by arduino matcher.
If you can build something small and light enough that is self-contained, I can have Bruce send you my Mettler H20. That has good resolution but IIRC the max weight it can take is 260g.
MET's don't have coils. I suggest you pick up the book. MET's are much simpler than MLT's.
In dunno that I have a definition. If you're talking about using an ardino with PLL to resonance match, you can call that an "ardino matcher". The point is, you were talking about using an ardino microcontroller and a PLL circuit to match the changing resonance.
And just to own an observation and predisposition: it has been extremely common over the years in this work, for hobbyists to want to build a thruster but never a replication. Everyone wants to make a splash by building something more powerful than what others have done. It is then no surprise when it doesn't work, and you learn nothing when it doesn't work because there are no controls built in. This is fine for a hobby, but it is not doing science.
Note even the big labs demonstrate this kind of behavior. I recall when Martin Tajmar had had his first positive results in his gravity experiment there were three labs looking at doing a "replication": Earthtech down in Austin, The Aerospace Co. out in CA and a group in New Zealand were all talking about a replication, but not one of them intended to do a replication. They all wanted to scale up the experiment so if they had a positive result, they'd make a splash. Lucky Martin immediately took the superconducting ring out of the chamber and got the same results, showing the signal was spurious, or each of these three groups might have wasted millions in trying to make a splash.
"Splash" is not what science is about. You cannot skimp on the balance if you want to do real science. Anything that skimps there, is just hobby and even with a positive result, you will have given people no good reasons to believe it is really demonstrating thrust.
Note too, that you learn nothing from a simple "on/off" it works or it doesn't experiment. If you want to learn, you have to provide scientific controls like those above. It is very common for people to want to build a demonstrator (on/off) but not a useful experiment.
Personally, I think if you can use an ardino controller to provide a new level of control in the power system, you will have accomplished something very useful, as well as creating what might easily become a financial source. You can patent controllers as well as treat them as trade secrets and sell them. So as I said, choosing one part of the experimental process has real benefits and results in a more doable task.
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis
Re: Mach Effect progress
vnbt4 wrote:The idea i had was to first mount a prototype onto a small RC car and see if it moved and then maybe move to a pendulum if the RC test work out. I was wondering in a MET does the charge and discharge of the coils and capacitors happen at the same time or is there a miniscule delay in the charge discharge rates of the coils compared to the capacitors? Also, would you mind defining what you meant by arduino matcher.
You are seriously overestimating the amount of thrust you can plausibly get. With Dr. Woodward producing micronewtons, you aren't going to be moving a small race car with it.
‘What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass.’
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Re: Mach Effect progress
From what I understood there has been 1 newton of thrust from some of the resent test articles. What am i missing?
Re: Mach Effect progress
... er, you mean where they were extrapolating how many newtons per megawatt and suchlike?vnbt4 wrote:From what I understood there has been 1 newton of thrust from some of the resent test articles. What am i missing?
Such are appropriate figures when speculating on practical applications but you're not going to get a newton out of something you can mount on an RC... not even a fig newton.
But if the theory proves out then, even if you can't have Mach Effect RC races, modern spacecraft can have power budgets in the tens of kilowatts and in space no one can hear you burn rubber.
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Re: Mach Effect progress
Exactly right. IIRC, the recent vid of the Eaglework claims to a bunch of students out in AZ, was they had 4N/Kw, but they were not using a full Kw. They were not reporting a thrust magnitude but a thrust efficiency. I think Paul said their highest thrust impulse thus far was 110uN and their highest sustained thrust was 30-50uN. You can't measure that with an RC car.
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis
Re: Mach Effect progress
If it did move stiction or an asymmetric friction would be a reasonable suspect with that setup. Not only is the net force small, there's an alternating component that could easily bury the desired signal if you have a poor setup.vnbt4 wrote:The idea i had was to first mount a prototype onto a small RC car and see if it moved ...
The daylight is uncomfortably bright for eyes so long in the dark.
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Re: Mach Effect progress
That is a perfectly reasonable concern, and why I am suggesting the proper scientific controls. This issue is that some supposed drives commonly called "Dean Drives" capitalize on the difference between the static and dynamic coefficients of friction, and appear to be producing thrust when they are not. The most recent of these I'm aware of is the Russian Gennedy Shipov's work from about 2005. While Shipov claimed a 5D torsion physics explanation was at work, the thruster did not produce thrust when all friction was removed, and from the design, it was obvious what he had was a Dean Drive.hanelyp wrote:If it did move stiction or an asymmetric friction would be a reasonable suspect with that setup. Not only is the net force small, there's an alternating component that could easily bury the desired signal if you have a poor setup.vnbt4 wrote:The idea i had was to first mount a prototype onto a small RC car and see if it moved ...
Woodward has gone to great measures to clearly demonstrate he does not have a Dean Drive, and you can find those protocols in his book, pp.153, 164-170.
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis
Re: Mach Effect progress
I have already started looking into building a test pendulum and a vacuum chamber but might i ask if Paul March is restricted from telling us anything new about the test articles currently being tested at eagleworks?
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Re: Mach Effect progress
Since you're right down the road from Fullerton, why don't you go visit Jim and check out his system in detail?
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis