MIT engineers fly first-ever plane with no moving parts (2018)
news.mit.edu
news.mit.edu
"This is not the first flight of an ion-drive aircraft. Seversky was patenting and flying ionocraft in the 1960s [2], hobbyists have been building them for decades under the name "lifter", and a self-contained device that carries its own power supply was developed by Ethan Krauss in 2006.
MIT's device may be the first ionocraft to use wings for lift, however. The previous devices behaved more like helicopters than airplanes, and did not need wings to stay aloft."
[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0707-9
[1] https://pubpeer.com/publications/020C19C112F2605CEC4B34CA320...
Otherwise, this just seems to be MIT being MIT: creating a trivial improvement on an old technology (in this case, moving the boost converter onto the airplane to avoid a tether wire), and publicizing the hell out of it because it's cool.
This is much like the oft-cited issue that the reporters aren't responsible for the headlines --- that is picked by the editors to make as big of a splash as possible.
As far as "patenting a technology from the 60's", even an incremental improvement on an old idea is still patentable. The real test is whether the patent cited the prior art, and you can bet that MIT Press Office didn't read the patent application before breathlessly sending out the press release.
In this case, I'm not sure the MIT professor was aware of the "crackpot" invention that effectively pre-empted him. Many professors don't read patents (and there are lots of reasons why they shouldn't), and I'm not sure there was a paper.
One thing about patents is that if an invention is obvious in light of other inventions, it might not be patentable. In this case, I'm pretty sure that this combination of a technology from the 60's, a boost converter, and a LiPo battery may be "obvious" given the prevalence of other drones: it is a combination of two past inventions that fit together naturally (a drone + a propulsion technology). Of course, it will take millions of dollars worth of arguing for someone to say either way.
I wouldn’t call building an airplane that doesn’t need to be connected to the ground by wires a minor improvement. This makes a fun gimmick into something potentially useful.
News office: MIT SUPER-SCIENTIST INVENTS AIR TRAVEL
It's certainly an iteration rather than a complete revolution but seems like an important step. Certainly something like this would have more practical application, a basically silent drone that could fly over a battlefield would be a huge win.
I don't think it will dig itself out again.
It's tough to say if it can keep up with its reputation. In some ways this phenomenon is comparable to gentrification: the beauty and soul of a place sometimes dies when the people who made that place what it is are displaced, like how Somerville and Berlin changed/are changing. It makes no sense for someone to remain committed in an academic career track when they're paying the kind of rent they do when around MIT/Harvard area with the income they make, so I agree with you that it's no longer attracting the kind of people that made MIT what it once was.
There are some institutions, that not many know about yet, that I'm confident in a couple of decades everyone will know about like U of Copenhagen and KIT & U of Stuttgart in Germany, and I think some in the midwest (Purdue, UMich, etc.) will one day have their day to shine too.
In Germany a lot of research is not done at the universities but at various institutes such as Max-Planck, Fraunhofer, Helmholtz, Leibniz and a lot more.
General overview, research institutes being one item: https://www.research-in-germany.org/en/research-landscape.ht...
Ca. 400 universities - but ca. 1,000 publicly funded research institutions (https://www.research-in-germany.org/en/research-landscape/re...).
So, the ranking of the universities overall may not be completely comparable.
Have you seen the videos?
With ambitions, there are different levels:
- An ambitious scientist should be driven to make ambitious discoveries
- An ambitious scientist should not be driven to steal credit, fake results, hype, oversell, and defraud
MIT's culture changed over the past 20 years. High competition (e.g. 4:1) leads to the type of people who do good work. With insane competition (e.g. 1000:1), the only way to "win" is to cheat.
What they cant do is screen talent.
For faculty positions, the competition is extreme; around 1000:1. That lends itself to people who cheat the system. In this case, it means, at the very least, overselling results, baking data, and giving TED-style talks. In many cases, it results in much worse.
The extreme competition also drives off many people who just want to nerd.
MIT isn't going away anytime soon, but that's why I think the problems may be hard to fix. The culture is broken.
Don't know why, but makes me think of Google.
The other "brand" that universities care about is the their reputation by their professor's peers when it comes to hiring the best talent for their departments, and with the granting agencies who are deciding which research proposals they should fund. And here, what matters is the peer-reviewed publications at various academic journals and conferences. Whether a university's press office puts out a press release, which then gets mangled by various newspapers, doesn't really have negative or positive effect when it comes to how a university's research work is measured by the People Who Really Matter --- namely, other professors and the people who dispense the cash. Hacker News falls into neither of these two categories.
It's not clear whether this thing can steer (by changing ion balance?), if this prototype can't but the concept might, or if it's forward only. If they can steer (change direction at will) without moving parts, that definitely sounds innovative.
Note: I'm not criticizing tech writing. Just what tech writing has become.
[0] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DsmahXYXoAAkaoI?format=jpg&name=...
The new device flies with no moving parts and with onboard power.
A self contained unit like the MIT one is an improvement on the lifter, because the ion drive is itself an improvement on the lifter. Or at least, a production version of one. What they’ve done is get the mass to thrust ratio below a threshold that allows for flight in atmosphere. That’s definitely worth some points, but not all the points.
This is just the MIT press department embarrassing themselves again, or perhaps proving that sensationalism is a required part of science/funding these days.
That doesn’t sound the same to me.
> and as the ionic propulsion planes did before (as others have linked to).
But taking an ion propulsion system that previously only worked in vacuum and making it work at sea level is not nothing. I haven’t seen anything here to convince me it’s pure parlor trick. It’s part parlor trick for sure, but the sort that opens wallets.
How were they cheating? Lifters don't use ground effect at all. With a proper power supply, they have a power/weight ratio much greater than one. Does a helicopter or F22 Raptor cheat to fly?
> taking an ion propulsion system that previously only worked in vacuum
You misunderstand what this is. This ionizes air and accelerates it towards a surface with opposite charge. This design will not work in a vacuum, since it requires atmosphere [1] as a propellant. I built one of these thrusters when I was a kid using an old TV power supply. It takes some wire, aluminum foil, tens of thousands of volts, and a stomach for inefficiency (for example, the mentioned plane has a thrust of 6.25N/kW, the motor/prop on a drone is nearly 10x that). The only difference between a lifter and this is the direction of thrust, and the use of wings to supply lift, which all aircraft with a power to weight ratio less than 1.0 necessarily do. The accomplishment, and it is impressive, is the engineering to make it all light/efficient, given the terrible efficiency of these types of motors, while using the advancements in the energy density of batteries to allow it to be integrated.
> I haven’t seen anything here to convince me it’s pure parlor trick
I don't understand this. I don't think anyone is saying it's a parlor trick. It's impressive engineering. I just don't think it's accurate to say it's the first [2]. 20 years ago, there were sites with people attaching these to gliders (although, I can't find them anymore).
1. Theory of operation for the generation of the thrust: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion-propelled_aircraft#Electro...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion-propelled_aircraft#cite_no...
Is the MIT press department capable of being embarrassed? Maybe they embarrass MIT, or at least people associated with MIT, but I don't think they embarrass themselves or they'd have changed their behavior.
[0] https://www.abebooks.com/signed-first-edition/Electronic-Gad...
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rspa.2012...
A reference mentioned in the Nature article [0] above, has a good overview of the Mathematics.
It also mentions a UK patent from 1928 I did not see mentioned from the MIT Nature article:
"Brown TT. 1928 A method of and an apparatus or machine for producing force or motion. UK Patent no. GB300311 (A)." : https://patents.google.com/patent/GB300311A/en
This tech demo is amazing, but my mind immediately compares it to things like the ruby-throated hummingbird migration, in which a 5 gram bird[0] flies 500+ MILES nonstop over open water, on maybe 2 grams of fat storage.
Then they feed by hovering so accurately that they can reliably thread a 1/8" beak into a moving 1/4" target.
They can do this directly into 20 mph headwinds [0]. Also in rainstorms where they are constantly getting pelted with their bodyweight in wet missiles every few seconds.
They can also fly 30mph in level flight, which in body lengths / second is ~4x times faster than an SR-71.
[0] US nickels weigh 5 grams, for comparison.
[1] https://www.kqed.org/science/28759/what-happens-when-you-put...
(I did, a lot.)
If you don't watch the whole thing, fast forward to the slow mo at ~4:35. I still remember watching this for the first time 9 years ago...geez.
We would be after something that can carry a payload such as a salmon, a coconut, or a human.
The thing that gets me about it is they brew this fish oil into something with the energy density of *diesel* that they can then digest, and I have this mental picture of some kind of Endura-DI Shearwater flapping, clattering and smoking, all the way across the Atlantic in search of its breeding grounds...
They can do this directly into 20 mph headwinds [0]. Also in rainstorms where they are constantly getting pelted with their bodyweight in wet missiles every few seconds.
What I find amazing is that chickens appear to possess a sort of natural optical stabilizer - which will keep their heads still even when the rest of their body is moved. [1]
If this is a regular feature of bird anatomy, it would explain how a lot of their precision during flight is archived.
At least this made it click for me how an eagle is likely able to keep track of some tiny rodent hundreds of meters below it while hovering in mid-air and bracing against wind, turbulences, etc.
I suspect we have the same mechanism, but only applied to the eyeballs, not the whole head.
> The use of EHD propulsion for lift was studied by American aircraft designer Major Alexander Prokofieff de Seversky in the 1950s and 1960s. He filed a patent for an "ionocraft" in 1959. He built and flew a model VTOL ionocraft capable of sideways manoeuvring by varying the voltages applied in different areas, although the heavy power supply remained external.
Very cool to see though, you can make this at home with a very basic high voltage generator and a set of needles.
Here's another design for DIY: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGq7LfjDyZM
https://archive.org/details/VictoryThroughAirPower
Edit to add: Here's the Wikipedia page about Victory Through Air Power
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_Through_Air_Power
From the page:
Filmmaker Walt Disney read the book, and felt that its message was so important that he would personally finance a partly-animated short, also called Victory Through Air Power, which was released in July 1943.[3] Disney's purpose for creating the film was to promote Seversky's theories to government officials and the public. After seeing the film, Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt decided that Seversky knew what he was talking about, changing the course of the war.
Do you know if there’s anything new with this project/technology?
Interesting that it sounds pretty much like a regular drone.
But I suspect the time it flies in the video is the time it takes to completely empty the batteries, as is the usual caveat.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/o6h1bc/comment/...
I suspect that the design is silent due to its low power and that something with enough thrust to perform some useful task would be louder even if the noise is that of wind only.
I seem to remember first hearing about these "lifters" in highschool, so that would have been late 1990s. But that recollection is based solely on remembering the dumb friend I had who thought it would be a good idea to try to make one, not knowing anything about high voltage electricity.
Luckily, we were also too distracted by video games to go dumpster diving for a CRT or microwave transformer.
I am disappointed at the "MIT are boasting, nothing really to show" comments here.
This is not Earth shattering. But it is an achievement worthy of our respect.
This vehicle is self contained, has no external power supply, unlike all the other examples quoted.
I am very impressed
"No moving parts" is a dumb way to advertise this. It's a cool thing, an self-propelled ionic propulsion system, but the fact it has no moving parts isn't an especially interesting feature of it.
Ozone-producing consumer devices are banned in California. They are legal to sell in other places because of the negligence of regulators.
I’ve also been curious about using very large-area weak ionizers for future zeppelins.
Plasma propulsion has been used for zeppelin flight at a small scale. Plasmas are also used for flow control on wings and propellers. There doesn’t seem to be much unclassified research in the area, though.
If you separate an electron from an atom, charge is conserved, mass in conserved. Apply an electric field, then you shoot the ion one way and the electron the other. The heavy ion then acts like propellant. Mass still conserved, charge still conserved. At some point the electron is absorbed into some random ion elsewhere and the ion grabs an electron from elsewhere.
Kids and nerds were building stuff like this as science fair projects for years.
Mythbusters even made one of these on their TV show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCiU96rJJoo
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_thruster#Energy_efficiency
CUrious whether the physics can support much larger payloads.
EDIT: ok this one is more convincing https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iihprC5Huf4
My understanding is that the ionized air is used in tandem with electric field to accelerate plain air (non-ionized) by collision/friction. In other words, the ionized air is being used as a gaseous propeller.
I remember doing some napkin math, and the added weight/power would be a net loss.
I guess maybe the non ionized air acts to keep the ions around between the two charged grids for longer, which means that for each ion you create you can maybe exploit its attractive/repulsive force for longer?
I wonder if this stuff would attract lightning
So no, there's no moving parts involved in generating the lift.
GP (noun): the author of a previous comment which is the topic of the current comment. "the GP wasn't sure about the terminology until IIAOPSW came in and cleared it up."
Just take a glider and attach an Estes engine!