----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Foster" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Friday, February 02, 2007 11:54 PM Subject: [Vo]: Fred's Van de Graaff Antics
... > Therefore, an object with a strong negative charge will charge > the earth locally positive by induction and your spheres will > be strongly attracted to the earth, not repelled. The earth's > negative field will have been slightly shifted to the opposite > side of the world. I pointed this out earlier. Maybe if a third person comes up with the same remark it will become true? ;-) > If you want to play around with a propulsive force, I suggest > you try some Brown-Biefeld experiments. I've had numerous > positive results, but haven't written about them because I'm > not sure I've eliminated all the artifacts such as ion wind. You'll have a hard time eliminating such artifacts since BB devices are nothing but ion wind thrusters (aka ionocrafts or lifters or EHD thrusters), whose remarkably simple thrust equation has been known for decades: F=i*d/mu where i is current, d distance between electrodes and mu is ion mobility about 2E-4 for air ions in STP air, all in SI. Air discharge devices are nothing but ion wind simply because their thrust never gets larger than the above formula. But it can get lower if counteremission is occurring, or if the ions fan out as in the record breaking trough grid thruster I invented for Blazelabs (neither in Texas nor Canada ;) in 2004. In spite of, or rather thanks to the ion fan out feature, this design has beaten as I had expected all other lifter designs in terms of thrust per unit area, by a comfortable margin (3 times that of a standard lifter e.g. Naudin's, 1.5 times that of a flat grid De Seversky ionocraft), at the expense of a 40% lower thrust to power ratio. http://www.blazelabs.com/e-exp06.asp Michel
