On Jun 2, 2007, at 10:47 PM, Michel Jullian wrote:
I meant that in the absence of the rotor each stator wire tip will
create an ion wind loop in a _vertical_ radial plane (referring to
the first device photographed on the web site too).
Yes - two actually.
Er, why two?
The mental model I'm using consists of the radial stator wires
attached to the vertical shaft at the same level as the ping pong
balls. Given the stator ion wind leaves the stators in an outbound
radial direction, a pressure reduction occurs there, thus there has
to be, in the immediate vicinity of the wires, due to the reduced
pressure, an axial inflow of air to feed air to the stator wires.
That axial inflow should come from both top down and bottom up, thus
the creation of two doughnut shaped vortices with their holes
centered on the shaft, with opposed directions of rotation.
Yes, but not in the horizontal plane to which I referred.
Ah, in projection you mean,
No, I was actually referring to motion, streamlines, that occur in
that plane. It is not an uncommon thing to view (model) fluid motion
in a cross section. Technically I suppose it is a thin cross
section, having thickness dz.
I thought you meant the ions moved only in that plane because you
wrote "_outward_ radially", in fact it's only outward for a short
distance and then inward for most of the ion flight time.
Since the balls and tangential facing wires are the opposed charge
attractor of the ions, I expect a lot of the ion radial motion is all
the way out there.
One thing I did forget is that the stator wires are grounded, so a
charged wire ring or some such would be needed to replace the
armature in order look at the air flow when there is no armature.
Regards,
Horace Heffner
