EM Drive

Point out news stories, on the net or in mainstream media, related to polywell fusion.

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AcesHigh
Posts: 655
Joined: Wed Mar 25, 2009 3:59 am

Re: EM Drive

Post by AcesHigh »

Good to see you are still around Paul.

I guess you sometimes itch to post news and stuff here and at NASA Spaceflight, but the itch must persist because of the non disclosure contracts you signed, am I right? :lol:

Diogenes
Posts: 6967
Joined: Mon Jun 15, 2009 3:33 pm

Re: EM Drive

Post by Diogenes »

paulmarch wrote:
AcesHigh:

You can inform Dr. Rodal that most of the observed forces in the Eagleworks Lab frustum devices were prompt with the same rise and fall times as our electrostatically derived calibration forces and therefore are not thermal in origins. That's not to say we didn't see thermal effects, especially with input RF power levels greater than ~35W, but the thermal effects with these large copper plus dielectric test articles, (2.5 to 5.0kg), always take tens of seconds to develop and are easily distinguished from the prompt E&M or more interesting force inputs since they always exhibit exponential rise and fall times.

BTW, the copper frustum's temperature never rose more than 1.0 degree F. when using the above average power levels and test articles.

Best,


Excellent slapdown.
‘What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass.’
— Lord Melbourne —

AcesHigh
Posts: 655
Joined: Wed Mar 25, 2009 3:59 am

Re: EM Drive

Post by AcesHigh »

Dr Paul, do you still have your Nasa Spaceflight account (StarDrive, right?)

Maybe you can post directly there (even if to say you can´t say anything more because of the contracts you signed when joining Eagleworks Lab), because Dr Rodal posted a few more questions:
@aceshigh, thank you for your initiative to pursue this with Paul March. Please thank him for his answer, which is much appreciated. It would be great if you could pursue further answers to the following questions:

1) What was the length (between upper support and lower fixture point) of the pendulum ?

2) What was the total weight suspended from the pendulum ?

3) What were the different shapes (cylindrical, disc, etc. ?) and the dimensions of the Teflon dielectric resonators that were used in the experiments?

4) What were (all) the surface Boundary Conditions of the Teflon dielectric resonators ? how were the dielectric resonators put in position?

or maybe if you can´t post this directly at a public forum, you still can email him? He gave his MIT email at the NSF thread
http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index. ... =29276.270

birchoff
Posts: 200
Joined: Sun Jul 27, 2014 7:11 pm

Re: EM Drive

Post by birchoff »

Since aceshigh inadvertently pushed this conversation over to NASA Spaceflight :D. I found something interesting over there.

So the paper that cause the recent stir of excitement and lazy reporting was from a 2013 test campaign, that tested the Cannae device and a version of Shawyers tapered frustum.

however according to https://xa.yimg.com/kq/groups/86787010/ ... r+2013.pdf. It would seem that they also tested a device built by Boeing. Interestingly enough that device doesnt seem to be included in the report that was published. Does anyone have any ideas why this would be the case? Personally I am assuming there is some NDA or something similar governing the Boeing SFE test article. but if anyone has any better information I would love to hear it.

tokamac
Posts: 55
Joined: Wed Nov 04, 2009 2:50 pm

Re: EM Drive

Post by tokamac »

I also found this Eagleworks document from last year:
http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi. ... 000851.pdf
which states (page 40) the SFE test article from Boeing/DARPA produced 20 to 110 µN of thrust on their pendulum. This would be comparable to the force produced by the EmDrive test article. But don't be impressed by the numbers though, because the SFE is relying on asymmetric capacitors like those from Thomas Townsend Brown, hence on the ion wind. So it's not propellantless, and wouldn't work in a vacuum. Please note however, that Hector Serrano, inventor of the SFE (Serrano Field Effect) and CEO of Gravitec Inc., insists on the contrary and ran tests in a hard vacuum of simpler, Brown-like, asymmetric capacitors.

I've just sent a message to Serrano about this Gravitec-Boeing-DARPA-NASA connection. We'll see if he answers.

BTW the Gravitec website is offline since early 2014 (like the Cannae LLC web site…). Here it is, archived. Poor information alas.

AcesHigh
Posts: 655
Joined: Wed Mar 25, 2009 3:59 am

Re: EM Drive

Post by AcesHigh »

the biggest question on NSFForums thread right now is why haven´t they haven´t scaled up the test devices to tens/hundreds of kW, which according to the theories, would have increased the effect. Since Paul is an electric engineer, he could answer that, but the topic has increased in over 10 pages since last time Paul posted there.

I remember all the talks here at Talk Polywell about the search for materials, ceramics, etc, to increase the effect at Mach Effect test devices. I wonder if it´s related (considering Q-Thruster operates on Mach Effect principle, according to GiThruster)


Therefore, could the lack of scaling up of the Eagleworks Q-Thruster devices, through increased power input, be caused by the lack of such specific materials?

GIThruster
Posts: 4686
Joined: Tue May 25, 2010 8:17 pm

Re: EM Drive

Post by GIThruster »

I would never pretend to speak for Paul, but I can relate to you what his positions have been in the past. Last I heard, he was still maintaining he believed that Sonny's QVF model and Jim's M-E model were opposite sides of the same coin, despite Jim, Sonny and myself keep arguing this cannot be true. As result, paul's interest was in low-k materials that can be run at high frequencies since these low k materials don't suffer the same non-linearities and other troubles most high k materials have.

I doubt the trouble is lack of materials. I think Eagle has been remarkably productive, and I have little complaint there. Scaling up a thruster to Newtons of force just to scale it up is not useful at this point. What you want are high figures of merit (FOM's) in thrust to mass and thrust to power. You can alway build arrays of thruster later on if you get decent FOM's.

I am still on record that I don't trust the data coming from Eagle, but I'd just note that it the rumors are true and three more NASA centers are going to jump into the fray and start testing, we'll have real answers in the next year or two. Stennis already has a balance, so they could do validation studies pretty quickly. NASA has remarkable resources. They just need to be properly tasked.

I would just note though, that for a commercial grade M-E thruster, you really do want a Colossal Dielectric Constant (CDC) material that maintains its constant up into very high frequencies. Paul wasn't looking at that stuff despite I did recommend some to him.
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis

GIThruster
Posts: 4686
Joined: Tue May 25, 2010 8:17 pm

Re: EM Drive

Post by GIThruster »

I would never pretend to speak for Paul, but I can relate to you what his positions have been in the past. Last I heard, he was still maintaining he believed that Sonny's QVF model and Jim's M-E model were opposite sides of the same coin, despite Jim, Sonny and myself keep arguing this cannot be true. As result, Paul's interest was in low-k materials that can be run at high frequencies since these low k materials don't suffer the same non-linearities and other troubles most high k materials have.

I doubt the trouble is lack of materials. I think Eagle has been remarkably productive, and I have little complaint there. Scaling up a thruster to Newtons of force just to scale it up is not useful at this point. What you want are high figures of merit (FOM's) in thrust to mass and thrust to power. You can alway build arrays of thruster later on if you get decent FOM's.

I am still on record that I don't trust the data coming from Eagle, but I'd just note that if the rumors are true and three more NASA centers are going to jump into the fray and start testing, we'll have real answers in the next year or two. Stennis already has a balance, so they could do validation studies pretty quickly. NASA has remarkable resources. They just need to be properly tasked.

I would just note though, that for a commercial grade M-E thruster, you really do want a Colossal Dielectric Constant (CDC) material (k=>5,000) that maintains its constant up into very high frequencies. Paul wasn't looking at that stuff despite I did recommend some to him.
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis

birchoff
Posts: 200
Joined: Sun Jul 27, 2014 7:11 pm

Re: EM Drive

Post by birchoff »

sounds like a reasonable reason. However, I really hope that more experiments are done on the ME devices.

birchoff
Posts: 200
Joined: Sun Jul 27, 2014 7:11 pm

Re: EM Drive

Post by birchoff »

GIThruster wrote:I would never pretend to speak for Paul, but I can relate to you what his positions have been in the past. Last I heard, he was still maintaining he believed that Sonny's QVF model and Jim's M-E model were opposite sides of the same coin, despite Jim, Sonny and myself keep arguing this cannot be true.
Why is it not possible for QVF and ME to be "opposite sides of the same coin"

birchoff
Posts: 200
Joined: Sun Jul 27, 2014 7:11 pm

Re: EM Drive

Post by birchoff »

GIThruster wrote:I would just note though, that for a commercial grade M-E thruster, you really do want a Colossal Dielectric Constant (CDC) material (k=>5,000) that maintains its constant up into very high frequencies. Paul wasn't looking at that stuff despite I did recommend some to him.
Can you share the name of some of these recommendations?

paulmarch
Posts: 155
Joined: Tue Sep 08, 2009 7:06 pm
Location: Friendswood, TX USA

Re: EM Drive

Post by paulmarch »

birchoff wrote:
GIThruster wrote:I would never pretend to speak for Paul, but I can relate to you what his positions have been in the past. Last I heard, he was still maintaining he believed that Sonny's QVF model and Jim's M-E model were opposite sides of the same coin, despite Jim, Sonny and myself keep arguing this cannot be true.
Why is it not possible for QVF and ME to be "opposite sides of the same coin"
Dr. Woodward maintains that the M-E's mass fluctuations occur in the "squishy" intermolecular chemical bonds of the dielectric and not in the rest mass of the ions in question. Next question is what are these squishy intermolecular chemical bonds made of? They are typically called covalent sharing of molecular electrons and/or an imbalance of ionic electric charges between the charged ions. Ok then what is in between the electrons and ions in these dielectric molecules that is affected by the M-E equation's transient gravity waves, or in other words what do the M-E's pressure transients in the cosmological gravitational field affect in between the molecules that for all practical purposes is a pure vacuum state. A vacuum state filled only with virtual photons of the electric fields and perhaps the virtual e/p pairs of the quantum vacuum. That is why I continue to say that Dr. White in only trying to answer what Woodward's M-E "gravity" pressure waves are effecting at the molecular and subatomic scales. A place that Dr. Woodward refuses to go to this date except perhaps in his musings on the ADM electron structure where the gravitational field is used to counter balance the electrostatic field forces, but once again ignoring the basic question of what either of these fields are composed of. That is supposed to be the realm of quantum gravity, but since no one has come up with an accepted answer for same, Dr. White is free to suggest his own.

Next, in regards to the Boeing SFE work that the Eagleworks Lab performed back in the spring of 2013, since it was and is covered by NDAs, all I can comment on is the already released Eagleworks 2013 newsletter that has been pointed to on this forum. I can however assure you that these results were run in a hard vacuum (~5x10^-6 Torr) and are categorically NOT ion wind or unbalanced electrostatic charges.

from Ron Stahl: "I am still on record that I don't trust the data coming from Eagle, but..."

I have to reassure Mr. Stahl that I have always reported and will continue to report the actual data that I recorded In our Eagleworks Lab reports and that Dr. White has never asked me to falsify any of this data we have presented. If you think otherwise that is your privilege, but it's not an accurate picture in any way.

Best,
Paul March
Friendswood, TX

GIThruster
Posts: 4686
Joined: Tue May 25, 2010 8:17 pm

Re: EM Drive

Post by GIThruster »

Well Paul, two things. First, in your analysis of the two models, you fail to note that they have completely contradictory positions about where inertia comes from. They in fact form an exhaustive disjunction. Either inertia comes from the ZPF, or it comes from gravity, but certainly it makes no sense to say it comes from both. These are not the same. And this is why Sonny has always argued that Jim must be wrong, and Jim has always argued that Sonny must be wrong. They could both be wrong. Inertia could be an intrinsic property of matter, but they cannot both be right and this is just what they say about what they propose.

Second thing yes, I understand you are reporting accurately as possible about what has been done in the lab. I also understand that Sonny has not wavered in his inexplicable drive to mislead people. Anyone who can stand up in front of a classroom of students the way he did in AZ, and lie to all of them the way he did, is not to be trusted. And Sonny controls what comes out of Eagleworks, so people can't trust what Eagle has to say, despite they have men of honor like yourself working there. Sonny has discredited himself and his work time and again as part of a regular pattern now for all the years I've known him, and it would be foolish not to note he is not trustworthy.

I am curious though, about one seemingly noteworthy part of this puzzle. Who had you sign an NDA? Sonny and Eagleworks, yes? Okay. Could you explain to me why Sonny said in his interview with PopSci that what he could say was restrained by an NDA? Who did Sonny sign an NDA with?
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis

Axil
Posts: 935
Joined: Fri Jan 02, 2009 6:34 am

Re: EM Drive

Post by Axil »

FYI:

This info release is relatively new and it might not have been discussed here before, so here’s some recent results from NASA…

http://www.libertariannews.org/wp-conte ... dyEtAl.pdf


Excerpt from Abstract:

Anomalous Thrust Production from an RF Test Device Measured on a Low-Thrust Torsion Pendulum

“During the first (Cannae) portion of the campaign, approximately 40 micronewtons of thrust were observed in an RF resonant cavity test article excited at approximately 935 megahertz and 28 watts. During the subsequent (tapered cavity) portion of the campaign, approximately 91 micronewtons of thrust were observed in an RF resonant cavity test article excited at approximately 1933 megahertz and 17 watts. Testing was performed on a lowthrust torsion pendulum that is capable of detecting force at a single-digit micronewton level. Test campaign results indicate that the RF resonant cavity thruster design, which is unique as an electric propulsion device, is producing a force that is not attributable to any classical electromagnetic phenomenon and therefore is potentially demonstrating an interaction with the quantum vacuum virtual plasma.”

Carl White
Posts: 476
Joined: Mon Aug 24, 2009 10:44 pm

Re: EM Drive

Post by Carl White »

So, here they've tested both an EMDrive-like device and a Cannae drive device in a hard vacuum. They've also taken care to mute the possible effects of distant wave action and seismic activity.

The plan remains to be creating Q-thruster test articles to be shipped to a few labs, namely the Glenn Research Center, JPL and possibly the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, for replication.

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