PARIS – The blue glowing jets of science fiction spacecraft came a stepcloser to reality on Wednesday as US physicists unveiled the world’s firstsolid-state aeroplane powered in flight by supercharged air molecules.
More than a century on from the Wright brothers’ first artificial flight,scientists hailed the “historic” test of the new technology, which couldeventually slash greenhouse-gas emissions from aviation.
Ever since Orville and Wilbur Wright’s momentous glide in the winter of1903, aircraft have been driven by propellers or jets that must burn fuelto create the thrust and lift needed for sustained flight.
A team of experts from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology managed tounlock a process known as electroaerodynamics, previously never seen as aplausible way to power an aircraft.
They were able to fly the new plane, with a wingspan of five metres (16feet), a distance of 55 metres at a speed of 4.8 metres-per-second.
That’s hardly supersonic, but the implications of this unprecedented modeof flight could be stratospheric. “The future of flight shouldn’t be thingslike propellers and turbines,” said Steven Barrett, who designed theprototype.
“It should be more like what you see in Star Trek with a kind of blue glowand something that silently glides through the air.”
At first glance, the plane itself doesn’t look lightyears away from otherrenewable aircraft, such as the Solar Impact II craft that in 2015-16 usedenergy from the Sun to fly around the world.
Unlike Solar Impact, Barrett’s plane doesn’t have any propellers or solarpanels — or any moveable parts whatsoever.
Instead of engines, it is powered by a system comprising two main sections.
At the front of the plane sit a series of parallel electrodes made up oflightweight wires that produce an enormous voltage — +20,000v –supercharging the air around it and splitting away negatively chargednitrogen molecules known as ions.
At the plane’s rear are rows of aerofoils set to -20,000v. The ionsautomatically move from a positive to negative charge, dragging with themair particles that create the so-called “ionic wind” to provide theaircraft with lift. – APP/AFP