this airflow is resulting from a very special type of thruster using an exotic type of power. You see, the early 1900s saw all forms of high voltage innovation. Violet wands were curing sore wrists and crippled knees, radio was captivating the world, and ignition coils led to a new form of ground transportation. Fast forward to 2018, and MIT took to the skies with an ionic thrust airplane. The ah, they beat me to it. Their design was brilliant and included aspects from a decades-old device called an ionic lifter, which we'll talk more about later. But it honestly got me thinking, you know, what is a step beyond the classic ionic lifter design? Jet turbines are an evolution of the propeller, so what is the evolution of ionic thrust? Well, after weeks of routing, sanding, cutting, measuring, grinding, welding, winding, and gluing, here's my attempt to answer that. This is a multi-stage ionic thruster. Unlike a traditional fan or turbine, it doesn't use moving parts to

accelerate air. It uses specialized electrodes and a family-friendly 40,000 volts. You could say I'm a fan. Oh [Music]. Ionic thrust is still in its infancy. It's kind of an emerging text, so to speak. And if that's your thing, you will love what Keysight Technologies is gearing up for. Let's take a look. It's a huge virtual event called Keysight World Innovate, where industry leaders, experts, and legit futurists will share their vision of the future state of technology. Their topics are pretty epic, including 5G and 6G tech, electric and autonomous vehicle advances, quantum technology, digital twins, and AI. And what's crazy is Keysight World Innovate is a free four-day event. Each day is about 90 minutes and includes two keynotes from industry leaders, as well as a panel discussion. Dates and times vary depending on location, but it starts with the Americas, which runs from October 4th to the 7th, and Europe's event kicks off on October 11th. There

are also dedicated events for other countries and languages, so basically, it's a big deal. I left a link down below, so I'll see you there. Okay, at its fundamental level, ionic wind is actually pretty simple. It's essentially air movement resulting from a DC electric field with high enough voltages. A sharp positive electrode will ionize the surrounding air molecules. That's the glow you see, and what's coming up later, those charged molecules are then repelled away and attracted to a wider ground electrode. In the process, they bump into other neutral air molecules and end up creating a flow of wind in that dedicated direction called Electro hydrodynamic thrust, or if you're not a schmuck, you just call it ionic wind. Ionic lifters take this to the next level and are wonderful at demonstrating thrust using ionic wind. When a high DC voltage is applied, usually from a big external power source, air flows downward from a thin suspended wire towards the grounded metal body, which causes lift. It's a design that's time-tested, tried, and true.

so I'm going to borrow from it. And since this next-gen Thruster is kind of a newer idea, I had a few requirements for my build. First, I need to determine what relationship voltage and thrust share, so I needed an adjustable high voltage Supply. And thanks to one of my patreons, it was a cinch. Thank you. Luckily, I've built many voltage multipliers over the years, and I had a spare one sitting around. When powered by this 10 kilovolt flyback Supply that was donated to me, it provides anywhere from 10 to 60 kilovolts, which I can simply tap into for each test. Second, is there an Optimum spacing between electrodes? I don't know, so I'd like the distance between electrodes to be adjustable. And lastly, thrust to weight ratio is super critical if this is ever going to be a feasible idea, so I want to keep this build really light, maybe under a pound, pound and a half. [Music] foreign with weight in mind, I cruised out to plasma Plastics to gather my supplies. I

found some lighter materials and began the massacre. [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] thank you. [Music] So, it took a little bit longer than I'd like because I redesigned it twice, but here's the final result. Each circular support contains a length of wire to act as the positive electrode, and these neon green squares hold the ground electrodes. The positive electrodes are wired together in parallel, and the negative electrodes are wired in parallel as well, so all the segments receive power at the same time. It's a little more fragile than I'd prefer, but I'm excited. Partly by chance, it ended perfectly within my weight limits at just over a pound. [Applause] [Music] This entire build was about creating thrust, right? So, I needed to find a quantifiable way to measure airflow in the first place. Well, after a quick Amazonian search, I found this incredible little wind meter for cheap, which can measure down about 0.1 meters per second. This will provide

quantitative measurements. I also bought some yummy strawberry candles to qualitatively show any air currents that develop for the upcoming testing. I built this stand that serves a couple of really important purposes. So, first of all, it holds everything in place, it stabilizes it, but most importantly, it provides electrical isolation from whatever surface it's being tested on. To start out, I set spacing randomly at an inch and a half, making sure that all sections were identical, and selected a random voltage of 20 kilovolts. Here goes nothing. Good operation. Ow, that's gonna leave a mark. So, round two, I'm gonna give it a lot more voltage, and I realized that the candles were out of the way of the airflow in the first place, so I've lifted them up into the path of destruction. I really hope this works because I spent a lot of time building this. Oh, hahaha, yeah, it works. A lighter didn't stand much of a chance either and could be blown out as far back as three or four feet off camera. I'm assuming the airflow coming out of

this is somewhat laminar. Let's take a look. [Music] That's so cool. Super exciting. Um, I still want to be able to visualize the airflow, though, and I think I have a solution. [Music] A little chunk of dry ice is going to do wonders in terms of visualizing the airflow. God. [Applause] Converging inwards. I was curious about the hard numbers, though, so in came the wind meter. I started spacing at one inch and tapped the third stage from the multiplier, providing 33 kilovolts. As you can see, this led to a velocity of 1.6 meters a second. Next, I selected one stage higher on the multiplier, providing 45 kilovolts. This led to an increase in velocity up to 1.9 meters per second. I then selected a higher stage providing 56 kilovolts and fire-hosed that baby. With that change, it broke 2 meters a second. Finally, I tapped into the highest voltage I was willing to test at 66 kilovolts and crossed my fingers.

this also led to an identical wind velocity of 2 meters a second. I repeated this process for 1.5-inch and 2-inch spacing, which provided really clear data. Two inches resulted in abysmal velocities of 1.3 meters a second. 1.5 inches showed an increase up to 1.8 meters a second, and one-inch spacing was king at 2 meters per second. Placing them together shows a pretty obvious trend. Up to this point, I've just used uniform spacing, so what about staggered spacing? I've got it set up with inch and a half from the front, inch and a quarter in the middle, and one-inch spacing in the back. Let's try that. Oh, that's a huge increase. Staggered spacing was a total underdog and provided a 15% higher velocity at 2.3 meters a second. I was pretty happy with the numbers, but then I decided to turn out the lights, and what you're about to see is why I love this field of physics.

[Music] God, it's just the most gorgeous display of plasma I've ever seen. It's like a plasma force field, and the still frames are on a whole new level. I could look at these all day. Let me know in the comments if you want to see more of these. Okay, so for this design, about 45 kilovolts and staggered spacing produce the fastest airflow at 2.3 meters a second, which consumed about 90 watts of power. But what does that equate to in terms of thrust? Well, as opposed to calculating, I chose to measure it in real time with the help of some nylon spacers. I've got the Thruster turned upside down so that it's sucking in air at the base and then actually thrusting upward, so it's pressing down on the scale. I've got about an inch gap at the base to let additional airflow in. Let's do this. Initiate screaming banshee. Okay, 21 grams of throw. Oh, 22 grams of thrust. That's not bad.

22 grams of thrust isn't a bad start. It's actually the weight of this empty can right here, and the Thruster weighs 490 grams. So, that's about a 4.5 thrust-to-weight ratio at around 4.1 watts per gram of thrust. That might not seem like much, but I already know some design changes I can make to shave the weight by 50% while effectively doubling the effect of airflow. So, this design has a potential of 18%. But is this series stack design an improvement over a single-stage design in the first place? 2.3 meters a second was with power being provided to all the segments at once in parallel. So, I'm going to disconnect power to the first segment and see how that affects velocity. You moment of faith. After disconnecting various stages, I found the answer is yes. Two stages result in a 33% increase, and three stages a 50% increase in velocity. This design represents my attempt at improving ionic thrusters, and I'd like to call it the BSI Thruster. It's also

the first step towards me designing an ionic thrust airplane of my own design. I love how it turned out, but it does have some inefficiencies. I'm thinking of three in particular. Let me know in the comments down below if you think you can spot those three areas, and whoever's closest will get pinned. Otherwise, just let me know your honest thoughts on this build. I do plan on a version 2 of this Thruster, so if you enjoyed what you saw, you might want to subscribe so you don't miss out. Also, I'll leave a link to keysight's event in the description down below, as well as a link to the new plasma Channel merch. Massive thank you to all the patreons who just continue to uplift my work, and thank you for watching. You Stay classy.

Designing A Next-Gen Ionic Thruster! (For Flight)

Designing A Next-Gen Ionic Thruster! (For Flight)

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