Paul March has explained what scaling up could look like if development were to proceed smoothly from here:
Jim’s current speed of sound limited acoustical based PZT stack design can be scaled up to at least the 1-omega 600 kHz power frequency range before their manufacturing has to done with integrated circuit like production approaches due to the small sizes needed work with mechanically resonant systems. That should allow Woodward to increase his thrust levels by at least a factor of 100 or even 1,000 times his current 1.0 uN thrust levels especially if the 2-omega force rectification signal can be boosted from its currently abysmal ~2.0% to 5.0% of the amplitude of the applied 1-omega delta mass drive signal up to 100% or higher due to the bandwidth limitations of his Carvin amplifiers and homegrown matching transformers.
To go much higher in operating frequency than ~1.0-to-10 MHz, a Mach Lorentz Thruster (MLT) like structure that uses much faster propagating electric and magnetic fields in the active dielectric instead of the much slower speed of sound limited acoustical resonance approach used in theses PZT stacks will have to be used IMO. Once we better understand the ceramic bulk acceleration issues surrounding the current dielectrics used in our MLT designs, operating frequencies up into hundreds of MHz will probably be feasibly. The MLT approach should then provide thrust levels that are on the order of (200 MHz/2.0 MHz)^3 = 1,000,000 times higher than my milli-Newton thrust levels reported in my and Andrew Palfreyman’s STAIF-2006 report. That means for the same input power of ~20 Watts we could be producing thrusts on the order of 1,000 Newtons, which opens up the M-E terrestrial transportation applications as well as space based applications.
Mach Effect Propulsion would enable a science fiction like future
If the Mach Effect is real [mass fluctations) and behaves as theorized (with some experimental confirmation) by James Woodward and the effect scales up as expected then we can create propellentless space drive. It appears that the latest research work by James Woodward is validating the existence of the effect.
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Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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