htmagic wrote:[
I believe you are referring to this figure:
Yep, that's the one.
Now if you look at this sketch, it is a side view of a saucer showing the flow lines of the ion streams (it's all about ions). Now the picture gives us the impression that there are two vortexes under the craft. But really it is like a side view of a smoke ring underneath and the side view shows the flows going into the center of the ring and then around and around and around, entraining more ions from the surroundings. And at these high voltages, this flow of ions into this plasma will keep the plasma energized with a ready supply of ions. And this plasma "bubble" under the craft will keep it aloft. As long as there are ions present, you don't need air for it to work. That's why the barium titanate and/or cesium was used.
Yes, I can get that it's a rotating smoke-ring like vortex. 'Fluid' is flowing and spiralling as it spins. What I don't get, from my high-school understanding of physics, is how such a self-contained vortex of ions could, in a vacuum, generate lift. Conventionally speaking ,there's no 'working fluid' or medium to push against, no outside source of ions. Since the ions are being recirculated, they're not being shoved out the back as in a conventional ion drive (or even a lifter with its MHD effect), so there should be no net force at least from their movement.
Unless it's something to do with the motion of the ions generating an electrical field that pushes against an external magnetic field? In which case it could fly in a vacuum, but not outside Earth's magnetosphere? If so, it would be a sucky interplanetary craft, but it could be a great high-altitude flier, if the maths pans out - and conventional understanding of magnetism reckons we'd need a field of hundreds of teslas, I think, to generate something like 1G, and I'm pretty sure inverse square law would drain most of the force away as you rose. But even then, I'm not sure I understand how rotational motion gets converted into linear.
So something non-conventional is happening, I'm sure. But I can't pinpoint what.
Deyo describes something very much like MHD, but using the ether as a working fluid. He also talks about atomic nuclei being little gyroscopes, and effectively the principle being the same at the subatomic level as the macroscopic level, just faster / more powerful. I can see a toroidal vortex with its two axes of rotation being possibly something like Laithwaite's forced precession (but don't have enough grasp of mechanics to tell if they're at all physically comparable). One would think that if there *were* weird gyroscopic effects with vortices, they'd have been well-studied by now, right? Easy to create and play with. Just open a kitchen sink plughole and watch the water spin. And yet the rumours about Schauberger's Repulsine and tornados and friends persist - but are not well-studied. Why?
What happened with Argus (and certainly Starfish Prime in Operation Fishbowl) with the artificial radiation belts, electrons getting trapped in the Earth's magnetosphere 'like a cyclotron', seems similar, at least superficially, to a layman with no conception of the fine details. Magnetically confined toroidal ion flux, adapted for different results.
Cyclotron -> Calutron
Cyclotron -> Tokamak
Cyclotron -> toroidal configuration Brown tri-arcuate saucer
Cyclotron -> Argus/Fishbowl radiation belts
They all seem to inherit from that early cyclotron research, but in different directions. I suppose that's normal for a lot of research. Everything dates back to common ancestors, it doesn't prove much. But one of these things is not like the others, because we all know flying saucers do not exist. They've been erased from the record. Why?
The Magnetron in our good old microwave ovens also looks similar: electron vortices. And it's a component with its origins (or development) in WW2 radar. Which came first, the cyclotron or the magnetron? Which influenced the other?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetron
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclotron
A cyclotron is a type of particle accelerator. Cyclotrons accelerate charged particles using a high-frequency, alternating voltage (potential difference). A perpendicular magnetic field causes the particles to spiral almost in a circle so that they re-encounter the accelerating voltage many times.
Ernest Lawrence, of the University of California,Berkeley, is credited with the invention of the cyclotron in 1929. He used it in experiments that required particles with energy of up to 1 MeV.
All cavity magnetrons consist of a hot filament (cathode) kept at, or pulsed to, a high negative potential by a high-voltage, direct-current power supply. The cathode is built into the center of an evacuated, lobed, circular chamber. A magnetic field parallel to the filament is imposed by a permanent magnet. The magnetic field causes the electrons, attracted to the (relatively) positive outer part of the chamber, to spiral outward in a circular path rather than moving directly to this anode. Spaced around the rim of the chamber are cylindrical cavities. The cavities are open along their length and connect the common cavity space. As electrons sweep past these openings, they induce a resonant, high-frequency radio field in the cavity, which in turn causes the electrons to bunch into groups. A portion of this field is extracted with a short antenna that is connected to a waveguide (a metal tube usually of rectangular cross section). The waveguide directs the extracted RF energy to the load, which may be a cooking chamber in a microwave oven or a high-gain antenna in the case of radar.
The oscillation of magnetrons was first observed and noted by Augustin Žáček, professor at the Charles University, Prague in the Czech Republic, although the first simple, two-pole magnetrons were developed in the 1920s by Albert Hull at General Electric's Research Laboratories (Schenectady, New York), as an outgrowth of his work on the magnetic control of vacuum tubes in an attempt to work around the patents held by Lee De Forest on electrostatic control. The two-pole magnetron, also known as a split-anode magnetron, had relatively low efficiency. The cavity version (properly referred to as a resonant-cavity magnetron) proved to be far more useful.
There was an urgent need during radar development in World War II for a high-power microwave generator that worked in shorter wavelengths—around 10 cm (3 GHz) rather than 150 cm—(200 MHz) available from tube-based generators of the time. It was known that a multi-cavity resonant magnetron had been developed in 1935 by Hans Hollmann in Berlin. However, the German military considered its frequency drift to be undesirable and based their radar systems on the klystron instead. It was primarily for this reason that German night fighter radars were not a match for their British counterparts.
In 1940, at the University of Birmingham in the UK, John Randall and Dr. Harry Boot produced a working prototype similar to Hollman's cavity magnetron, but added liquid cooling and a stronger cavity. Randall and Boot soon managed to increase its power output 100 fold. Instead of giving up on the magnetron due to its frequency inaccuracy, they sampled the output signal and synced their receiver to whatever frequency was actually being generated.
Because France had just fallen to the Nazis and Britain had no money to develop the magnetron on a massive scale, Churchill agreed that Sir Henry Tizard should offer the magnetron to the Americans in exchange for their financial and industrial help. By September, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had set up a secret laboratory to develop the cavity magnetron into a viable radar. Two months later, it was in mass production, and by early 1941, portable airborne radar were being installed into American and British planes.[1]
An early 6 kW version, built in England by the GEC Research Laboratories, Wembley, London, was given to the US government in September 1940. It was later described as "the most valuable cargo ever brought to our shores" (see Tizard Mission). At the time the most powerful equivalent microwave producer available in the US (a klystron) had a power of only ten watts. The cavity magnetron was widely used during World War II in microwave radar equipment and is often credited with giving Allied radar a considerable performance advantage over German and Japanese radars, thus directly influencing the outcome of the war.
Common threads. Spirals. Vortices. Radar. Atomic research. WW2. US and UK cooperation. Anything more precise than that that we can get a handle on?
The cyclotron uses AC and the cavity magnetron uses DC. BUT, those cavities in the magnetron INTERRUPT the flow and cause a resonant frequency. An alternative way of accomplishing a similar effect? In both cases we have a pulsed, resonant toroidal flow of electrically charged particles in a magnetic field.