Mach Effect progress

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

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Diogenes
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Re: Mach Effect progress

Post by Diogenes »

birchoff wrote:Dio & GiThruster:

Taking what you both said as true. What would the design look like then? For example what would a miniturized version of either the single bolt or size bold configuration of the thruster in the deck below look like.

http://aspw.jpl.nasa.gov/files/ASPW2014 ... /Fearn.pdf


Image


I'm thinking it should look something like this with a built up capacitor bonded to one side, except, you know, without the bolts.


Similar in operation to this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_cry ... crobalance
‘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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Diogenes
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Re: Mach Effect progress

Post by Diogenes »

GIThruster wrote:Despite this, since the device has to oscillate at two frequencies, one of them will not be optimized. There's no way around this, even with more than one element in a stack.


Not following you here. I can see where the piezo device needs to be driven at mechanical resonance, but I do not see why the drive for the capacitor ought have an effect on the drive of the piezo device.


I would think you could drive them both with optimized frequencies.
‘What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass.’
— Lord Melbourne —

93143
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Re: Mach Effect progress

Post by 93143 »

birchoff wrote:why would you do construction in a gravity well. I get that it will be necessary in the short term. But it seems to me it would be much easier overall to eventually migrate all manufacturing into space.
Why? Gravity, air and easy access to resources make most things easier, not harder.

Barring specialized techniques that require microgravity or hard vacuum, in-space manufacturing makes sense for only two reasons: resource availability (presuming a scarcity on Earth that can be remedied with asteroid materials or some such) and the ability to skip the difficult, dangerous and energy-intensive step of launching stuff out of a substantial gravity well. (Also transit time, coupled with a less intense version of the launch problem, if you want to use the manufactured item a long way from the planet you'd otherwise be making it on.) With high-thrust METs, launching stuff into orbit is neither particularly difficult, particularly dangerous, or especially energy-intensive, so there's no reason to fear gravity wells any more. And the one-gee solution also reduces transit times to days in the inner solar system, or weeks in the outer.

Sure, some manufacturing would doubtless take place in space, in the posited future. Probably quite a lot. But I see no reason to avoid manufacturing in a gravity well if orbital launch is trivial.

birchoff
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Re: Mach Effect progress

Post by birchoff »

93143 wrote:
birchoff wrote:why would you do construction in a gravity well. I get that it will be necessary in the short term. But it seems to me it would be much easier overall to eventually migrate all manufacturing into space.
Why? Gravity, air and easy access to resources make most things easier, not harder.

Barring specialized techniques that require microgravity or hard vacuum, in-space manufacturing makes sense for only two reasons: resource availability (presuming a scarcity on Earth that can be remedied with asteroid materials or some such) and the ability to skip the difficult, dangerous and energy-intensive step of launching stuff out of a substantial gravity well. (Also transit time, coupled with a less intense version of the launch problem, if you want to use the manufactured item a long way from the planet you'd otherwise be making it on.) With high-thrust METs, launching stuff into orbit is neither particularly difficult, particularly dangerous, or especially energy-intensive, so there's no reason to fear gravity wells any more. And the one-gee solution also reduces transit times to days in the inner solar system, or weeks in the outer.

Sure, some manufacturing would doubtless take place in space, in the posited future. Probably quite a lot. But I see no reason to avoid manufacturing in a gravity well if orbital launch is trivial.
The things you listed are not real road blocks as they are needed if we plan on creating a permanent presence outside earth's atmosphere which means those problems will have permanent solutions on the cheap. So as someone looking to do any sort of manufacturing, I have cheap energy, relatively easy access to resources I need, and best of all very little government oversight. Also, I suspect that the environmentalists that are a thorn in the mining and manufacturing industry will likely evolve their argument. Right now we have no really good choice we need the resources being mined so we try and balance the damage with the desire of the people. When we do have a legit alternative, its going to be much easier to pass laws pushing the industrial base off world.

kunkmiester
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Re: Mach Effect progress

Post by kunkmiester »

IIRC one of the big problems Woodward has been having is designing power supply and control that can work with the higher frequencies(and deal with the resonance and stuff at those frequencies). If you can get a lower frequency system to generate useful thrust, it'll be done, if only by hobbyists. I doubt even commercial systems will be etching these onto ICs.

One of the things I think is really cool about this technology is that once the science is proved, and the basic engineering work is done, you really could build this stuff in your garage. There will be issues at first I'm sure, and it'll be more of a kit airplane type thing than 747s, but may be easier. I'm looking forward to seeing the first Millennium Falcon 1:1 model fly, regardless of how exactly it's powered.
Evil is evil, no matter how small

93143
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Re: Mach Effect progress

Post by 93143 »

birchoff wrote:The things you listed are not real road blocks
It sounds like you may have misread my post. I don't recall listing any "road blocks"...

More importantly, you were complaining about gravity wells in general, not Earth specifically. And my basic point was that high-thrust METs obviate the biggest reason to avoid gravity wells. (Perhaps my inclusion of air as an advantage of gravity wells obscured this distinction...)

birchoff
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Re: Mach Effect progress

Post by birchoff »

I should have chosen my words better than I did. I did not mean to infer that you did mean them as road blocks. I just don't see them as big enough advantages to make a difference in any decision. As you said Practical MET thrusters "obviate the biggest reason to avoid gravity wells". I would take that a step further and say that practical MET thrusters make deep gravity wells shallow if not flat. Which means they can be ignored when one is making decisions on where to locate something.

Another thing Practical MET thrusters do is basically shrink space in the same way that the automobile did at the time of its invention. Now we talk about months and years to access resources in space. After, we will talk about days and weeks. Between the asteroid belt, the Sun, mining ice from Saturn's rings and the ability to basically dial a gravity level (via centripetal force). There are degrees of freedom that are available in space that will not be available on Earth. Personally I think the biggest problem is we do not like to crap where we live. As a result the rules to mine/refine/manufacture things make those industries more costly than they need to be. Now I don't mean all manufacturing will migrate to space but I think a majority of it will; especially if humanity stretches out into the solar system.

Betruger
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Re: Mach Effect progress

Post by Betruger »

How would it not expand into the system? METs as conjectured are a needle to the balloon of so much social, political, economic, industrial, scientific (etc) overcrowding. E.G. the whole Global Warming shenanigan - problem solved (simultaneously, those sunshade swarms and bleeding off excess population off-planet and significantly improving ecological footprints anyway, all become feasible). It's time we stretch our legs.

Getting a significant fraction of the human race, or at least this still causally-connected population (ie unlike what two populations at opposite ends of Milky Way would be), exposed to e.g. the orbital "Overview Effect" is one of the priceless first steps towards "converting" people to a more natural, more cosmic livelihood and perspective of reality.

And this at the (relative to now) tiny expense that METs allow. Probes within and outside the solar system are so cheap we can literally swarm them out. It isn't just this orbital access problem that's shallowed out, it's everything that essentially depends on (currently not negligibly expensive) movement. It's hard to contemplate the current landscape and find something that's not changed by what ME tech allows, in performance and/or in economy. And even more so if it really is affordable to hobbyists.

That means not only mundane things like bicycles and "econobox" (Prius etc) vehicle get competition, but architecture also sees new paradigm opened to it, and imagine what Formula 1 etc would do/become with MET, but also what does it ultimately mean for the third world and for nastier regimes? Do they still need to be so nasty anymore? What does ME tech's full consequences do for the world's progress towards post-scarcity? Does ME tech pull the socioeconomic rug from under those regimes' feet, and/or does it allow them to be more powerful threats - e.g. sneak some METs out to an asteroid or a swarm of them and just steer that thing into New York, or something. Are the low level Maslow-type means of population control that oppressive regimes depend on, removed like tetris blocks horizontally sublimating out the bottom of that pyramid? Or does amputating that population from them, as the mere substrate to that regime, free them to be even more self-sufficient, even more insular and self-determinant, even more of a threat to everyone else?

I reckon the current surveillance infrastructure would have enough of a leg up that it would stay ahead (or as ahead as it is nowadays) of these oddball risks, even if by making surveillance even more prevalent than it is today - a solar system-wide CCTV kind of thing. For the common man though, it ought to mean that instead of something barely manageable like saving up 500k$ for a SpaceX trip to Mars, he might instead save up that much and simply levitate his whole personal habitat, snail's shell-like, to wherever he wishes. Modulo remaining constraints, e.g. radiation etc.



So all these things considered, it's hard not to opt for confirming or ruling out and moving on from the Mach Effect conjecture. Instead of just blowing it off as free energy crackpotism. It's not like it could turn into a neverending goose chase like ITER. The opportunity cost can't be ignored.
You can do anything you want with laws except make Americans obey them. | What I want to do is to look up S. . . . I call him the Schadenfreudean Man.

zapkitty
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Re: Mach Effect progress

Post by zapkitty »

Betruger wrote:That means not only mundane things like bicycles and "econobox" (Prius etc) vehicle get competition
Training wheels...

MET ground vehicle: wheeled version could be plug-compatible with current road systems and regulations if the MET "box" could be mounted so as to point downwards and swivel fore-and-aft maybe 45? degrees. While it wouId have wheel-based steering and brakes it would also have a braking capability that ordinary transmissions could not match and would care not a fig for wet/snow/ice road conditions.

Of course this would inevitably lead to MET hovercars and the end of asphalt road systems... but still easier to implement than an automated 3d flying car grid.

Said grid being the final evolution before personal wormhole transporters render it all moot.

paperburn1
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Re: Mach Effect progress

Post by paperburn1 »

Larry Niven transit booth
An inexpensive form of teleportation. They are similar in appearance to an old style telephone booth: one enters, dials one's desired destination, and is immediately deposited in a corresponding booth at the destination. They are inexpensive: a trip anywhere on Earth costs only a "tenth-star" (presumably equivalent to a dime). However a star is accosted as the value of mailing a wallet sized object anywhere planetwide.
Transit motor, a small much simplified version of a stepping booth, notable example in the glasses at a particular restaurant in known space the proprietor constantly refills customers glasses with alcohol.
Stepping disk Edit
A more resilient and elegant form of trnasit than human transfer booths. They employ open field zones and have multiple safety interlocks to prevent malfunction. Stepping disks are often fitted with molecular filters to speed simplistic transfer, either or ship refueling or oxygen carbon dioxide circulation. Stepping disks may also operate in an open mode, that is a stream of matter may be sent through at a high rate, be it water, solar plasma, particle beams, stones, or bullets.
I am not a nuclear physicist, but play one on the internet.

GIThruster
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Re: Mach Effect progress

Post by GIThruster »

Diogenes wrote:
GIThruster wrote:Despite this, since the device has to oscillate at two frequencies, one of them will not be optimized. There's no way around this, even with more than one element in a stack.


Not following you here. I can see where the piezo device needs to be driven at mechanical resonance, but I do not see why the drive for the capacitor ought have an effect on the drive of the piezo device.


I would think you could drive them both with optimized frequencies.
Mach Effects are generated at the 2w of the M-E generating signal, so if you drive a piezo capacitor with high electromechanical linking properties, you are charging/discharging and generating acceleration at 1w or the frequency of the drive signal, but your fluctuation occurs at twice that frequency. You then need to "rectify" that fluctuation into useful force, by pushing it when it's heavy and pulling it when it's light, so that is a 2w drive. The exception is when you have a material that is both highly piezoactive (1w mechanical response) and electrostrictive (2w mechanical response). In such instances you can drive with a simple sine wave though, you'd be better off with sawtooth. In this instance, where the material has both mechanical responses, the phase between the 1w and 2w is a function of the material and it cannot be changed. You cannot alter the phase between the 1w and 2w components because there is no 2w drive signal component.

Ideally for proof of science, you want a material with only one of these two different electromechanical linking qualities, because when you're forced to drive with both 1w and 2w signals, you have control over the phase between them. By altering the phase, you can eliminate the thrust, which makes the thruster its own perfect dummy load, or reverse the thrust. Since there are no other phenomena that predict reversible thrust based on the phase between the 1w and 2w drive components, reversing thrust is a superb protocol in demonstrating the science. This is the main reason Woodward went to PMN--it has no piezo response. He has to provide both 1w and 2w drive signals but he can then demonstrates what's he's got by altering the phase angle between the drive components.

Regardless of how you get your 2 mechanical oscillations, if you do this with one element--meaning you don't have one to accelerate at 1w and another at 2w but for practical reasons you have just 1 element as in all Woodward's work the last decade--then one of those oscillations has to be off resonance since each assembly has only one resonance.

Now certainly the work-around is to have at least two elements driven on resonance at two different frequencies, and you get the benefit of each of these operating on their natural resonance. Woodward has never explained why he stopped doing this years ago. He just likes the setup he's using. For ultrasonic iterations this is trivial to realize since you have to clamp your components together anyway. For VHF and UHF, multiple elements thrusters are problematic because they're typically not clamped and the bonds between elements cannot be glued. They require the more advanced bonding techniques I mentioned the other day. Woodward has never availed himself to such. He doesn't even sputter electrodes. He uses epoxy and brass foil. These create acoustic reflections and account for the accelerometer noise he's always wrestling with.

There is utility in single element designs, especially as regards generating acceleration noise. If what you want is to get out of the noise floor, you really don't want internal reflections and places where you can get destructive interference because your stack isn't driven as a single unit.
Last edited by GIThruster on Fri Dec 26, 2014 3:48 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

GIThruster
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Re: Mach Effect progress

Post by GIThruster »

93143 wrote:
birchoff wrote:why would you do construction in a gravity well. I get that it will be necessary in the short term. But it seems to me it would be much easier overall to eventually migrate all manufacturing into space.
Why? Gravity, air and easy access to resources make most things easier, not harder.

Barring specialized techniques that require microgravity or hard vacuum, in-space manufacturing makes sense for only two reasons: resource availability (presuming a scarcity on Earth that can be remedied with asteroid materials or some such) and the ability to skip the difficult, dangerous and energy-intensive step of launching stuff out of a substantial gravity well. (Also transit time, coupled with a less intense version of the launch problem, if you want to use the manufactured item a long way from the planet you'd otherwise be making it on.) With high-thrust METs, launching stuff into orbit is neither particularly difficult, particularly dangerous, or especially energy-intensive, so there's no reason to fear gravity wells any more. And the one-gee solution also reduces transit times to days in the inner solar system, or weeks in the outer.

Sure, some manufacturing would doubtless take place in space, in the posited future. Probably quite a lot. But I see no reason to avoid manufacturing in a gravity well if orbital launch is trivial.
Anyone who has ever worked with a wrench on the family car during the winter knows how difficult it can be to use tools while wearing gloves. Mechanics usually go fingerless so they still have the tactile feedback necessary to use their tools. Worse than full gloves are mittens. Worse still are space mittens. This problem of using all sorts of tools in space has been well documented by the astronauts working on ISS, both during construction and in general maintenance. If you can provide launch cheaply, most things will be better built on Earth. Building hotel rooms from composites is advanced carpentry. It requires a carpenter, not an astronaut. You will however need you astronauts to snap the hotel rooms together and glue 'em up.
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis

GIThruster
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Re: Mach Effect progress

Post by GIThruster »

birchoff wrote:I would take that a step further and say that practical MET thrusters make deep gravity wells shallow if not flat. Which means they can be ignored when one is making decisions on where to locate something.
Remember too that in situ space resource utilization which has been a hot topic for the last decade, still requires you get the resource. Whether you've conquered the transport challenge or not, you need to transport the components of an item to where it is manufactured, and the manufacturing process creates waste. Why lift epoxy to space to manufacture with unless there is a huge advantage to assembling in space?

Now if you find a magical epoxy with radiation hardening capabilities that are unrivaled, but that requires an autoclave (curing with heat in vacuum), space is a great place to have an autoclave. The power is cheap and the vacuum is free. Note though, with no gravity to pull the wasted bits of epoxy down, you could make a huge mess. You might for this reason settle for the Moon where its gravity collects all your waste products for you.
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis

Betruger
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Re: Mach Effect progress

Post by Betruger »

Why not use artificial gravity? A couple of BA 2100s tethered apart.
You can do anything you want with laws except make Americans obey them. | What I want to do is to look up S. . . . I call him the Schadenfreudean Man.

AcesHigh
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Re: Mach Effect progress

Post by AcesHigh »

GIThruster wrote:
birchoff wrote:I would take that a step further and say that practical MET thrusters make deep gravity wells shallow if not flat. Which means they can be ignored when one is making decisions on where to locate something.
Remember too that in situ space resource utilization which has been a hot topic for the last decade, still requires you get the resource. Whether you've conquered the transport challenge or not, you need to transport the components of an item to where it is manufactured, and the manufacturing process creates waste. Why lift epoxy to space to manufacture with unless there is a huge advantage to assembling in space?

Now if you find a magical epoxy with radiation hardening capabilities that are unrivaled, but that requires an autoclave (curing with heat in vacuum), space is a great place to have an autoclave. The power is cheap and the vacuum is free. Note though, with no gravity to pull the wasted bits of epoxy down, you could make a huge mess. You might for this reason settle for the Moon where its gravity collects all your waste products for you.
ok, but you are talking about current astronaut suits, which are quite bulky and inflated. The objective is to have skintight suits and gloves in the future

http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2014/second-s ... suits-0918

Image

http://www.computerworld.com/article/26 ... -skin.html
""With conventional spacesuits, you're essentially in a balloon of gas that's providing you with the necessary one-third of an atmosphere [of pressure,] to keep you alive in the vacuum of space," said Dava Newman, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics and engineering systems at MIT, in a statement. "We want to achieve that same pressurization, but through mechanical counterpressure — applying the pressure directly to the skin, thus avoiding the gas pressure altogether… Ultimately, the big advantage is mobility, and a very lightweight suit for planetary exploration.""

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