Electrowetting, Gerald Pollack, Gilbert Ling

[Drareg]

...or it could also be (partially) an electric effect for both, similar to the way spiders fly. At least for the bumblebees I am convinced it is due to electrostatic forces as if you touch a bumblebee you often get "shocked" similar to the way you get shocked when you touch a metal object after playing with plastic, balloons, or other charged objects.

Spiders Use Electricity To Fly

A fascinating study on the ability of spiders (and probably many other species) to not only sense electromagnetic fields but use the gradient between the Earth and higher elevations to fly for thousands of miles and up to 3 miles high. This phenomenon is called "electrostatic propulsion" and...

raypeatforum.com

Speaking of using electrostatic forces - why can't we produce a levitating vehicle that floats on an "airbag" produced by rotating plastic sheets underneath the vehicle? See article below for the mechanism, already confirmed multiple times.

Force Similar To Anti-gravity Observed In Real Life

As a person who works in the IT industry and has launched a few startups before, I often read the user-curated news site Hacker News. A few days ago, an article caught my eye. It seems that the article describes the generation of an electrostatic force capable of forming an invisible wall...

raypeatforum.com

Once the levitation occurs, then the vehicle can be moved forward by a propeller just like a regular prop aircraft. Like an air-boat but floating on air instead of water. Or, better yet, pushed by electrostatic repulsion! A third rotating plastic sheet is placed behind the vehicle and the charged air it produces pushes the vehicle forward due to the repulsive force and Newton's 3rd law. The video @Drareg posted about the balloon bending a water stream due to its electrical charge is a proof it can be done. So, basically a car equivalent of the maglev train but it needs no tracks or magnets, no power lines, and can go pretty much anywhere. It can run on gasoline to rotate the sheets, but based on the article about the situation that happened at 3M it looks like not much power is needed to produce a very "solid" airbag so the vehicle may even be able to run the sheet rotators on solar energy.
Also, in the case of the plane, even if pure electrostatic forces cannot be used to lift 100s of people into the air, why can't we at least do for a single person what the spider does? Namely, create the equivalent of the (charged) web, which, if capable of maintaining a stable charge, should allow a person to stay in the air indefinitely.
As the spider article says, the Earth surface is negatively charged, and also on most days there is 100V of potential difference for every meter of altitude above ground. On foggy, rainy days, that potential difference can reach tens of thousands volts. So, if a human equivalent of a "spider web" is created, and charged negatively and a person can take it to a mountain that is say 5,000-6000 feet above sea level, there may be enough electrostatic force to not only allow the person to lift off but potentially stay afloat indefinitely if the "web" is made of such material that when it floats through the air, the friction from it keeps it charged. Heck, it won't even need a propeller mechanism (like the plane) to do that. Just being tossed around by the extremely strong currents that start just 1km above ground would be more than enough to keep it charged, the same way it does so for the real spider web. Better yet, the spider is much more "dense" than a human as unlike humans, spider do not have much fat in their bodies. Their bodies are mostly protein. So, if it works for the spider then, with a properly scaled "web", it should work even better for the human.
Or on a more energy-harvesting line of thought - why can't the massive voltage gradient between say sea level and a mountain 4km-5km high be used to harvest electricity? A long cable is run up the mountain and is attached to a metal plate at the top of the mountain. The other end of the cable reaches the sea level. Then there is a second metal plate at sea level. Putting a battery or even light-bulb between the sea level plate and the end of the cable whose other end it at the top of the mountain should result in current flowing and either storage in the battery of lighting the light-bulb, right? Or instead of a mountain, a balloon is used to lift a cable attached to metal plate a few thousand feet in the air and the other end of the cable is on the ground.
Am I missing something here?

Apparently, the Bernoulli/Coanda effects are not enough to explain lift requited for airplanes (and bumblebees) to fly. I still think there is an EMF component somewhere in there. A metal (aluminum) wing (and body, actually) of an airplane moving quickly through air must get quite a bit of charge, no?

No One Can Explain Why Planes Stay in the Air

Do recent explanations solve the mysteries of aerodynamic lift?

www.scientificamerican.com

There is also the Barnett Effect, that I have been discussing with another user @pimpnamedraypeat on and off.

Barnett effect - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

In my opinion, this effect may explains gravity, both on a macro and micro/quantum scale (and there are publications already arguing that) because all matter is composed of "particles" rotating at massive speeds...or at least the neutrinos are.

https://arxiv.org/ftp/gr-qc/papers/0012/0012091.pdf

Given the rapidly spinning rotors of the airplane engines (a gyro of sorts), those can create massive electromagnetic forces that may also play a role, similar to how a gyro can seemingly defy gravity while rotating. Why can't the rotors inside the engines of the airplane be the same as the bicycle wheel in the video below and contribute to the lift. Am I missing something?

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8H98BgRzpOM


Skydivers, as @Drareg mentioned, do not get much charge, but this is because of the clothes they wear. With the right clothes, quite of bit of static charge is acquired.
I think there was an article about a guy doing freebasing from an airplane and when he landed he went to take a digital camera from a backpack on the ground to take pictures of his still airborne buddies and he got shocked unconscious when he touched the camera and also the camera's internal storage unit got damages from the discharge.

With that story in mind about the sky diver It would be interesting to drop objects from a high altitude, kind of like batteries that charge via the static generated in free fall, we could use something like the slingatron-

Giant Slingshot: New Way to Space? - Defensetech

All space projects get into orbit pretty much the same way by burning lots of rocket fuel, a spaceship powers itself past the sky. But...

www.defensetech.org

Some startup was having a go at it, they wanted to send rockets to space, the idea should be adjusted to shoot balls that will charge via static, they could be fitted with a gyro to steer it back to a conductive net. It could be fitted with a multitude of triboelectric nanogenerator’s.
We could even do what you mentioned earlier about a pole from a height and drop the ball along a conductive surface.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bD5TLlNXd1Y


Surely this centrifugal force in a vacuum could be used for earth based vehicle propulsion?

Static electricity as strong as lightning can be saved in a battery

Prof. Dong Sung Kim and his joint research team presented a new technology that can increase the amount of power generated by a triboelectric nanogenerator. The research team developed a high-efficiency integrated circuit to obtain reliable and practical electrical energy from the triboelectric...

www.eurekalert.org

In the meantime, the joint research team successfully invented an integrated circuit that converted temporary and unstable electric energy generated by a triboelectric nanogenerator into reliable power source. They demonstrated that even when 2.5 μW of energy was input, the conversion efficiency recorded over 70%. It was the first time the team verified that stable power of 1.8V was obtained without external power supply when this newly developed integrated circuit was used. This amount of power was enough to operate sensors of thermo and humidity meters, a calculator and more.

This research was the first demonstration of a triboelectric nanogenerator fabricated by nanoimprinting process using heat and pressure and poling process simultaneously. By using these newly introduced triboelectric nanogenerator and integrated circuit, it is possible to increase the total amount of electric energy produced by obtained static electricity and to convert it into reliable energy. It is expected that this technology can be a reference for future development of a self-powered system which operates sensors without external power source.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zphMggqPJNk

 

[Drareg]

The Scientific American article is what I also read, and that I was referring to in my initial reply, that there are two effects, one is Bernoulli, the other one is a momentum exchange (Newton). This completely describes the effect. No other 'magic' needed here.

Electrostatics? I explained in an example that the effect is at least four orders of magnitude too small. Magnetic (Barnett) effects? From what, spinning air? Impossible.

The pendulum in the MIT video is suspended by a string, it does not 'levitate'. That the suspending string stays vertical is a special feat of choosing the correct horizontal arm length, the mass of the pendulum, its angular inertia and the spinning speed. I calculated that once. I have spent some time looking at the interesting effect, which the late Prof. Erik Laithwaite discovered, here a demonstration of this incredible feat:


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeyDf4ooPdo


My explanation is that when you push the spinning wheel slightly, the force results in a small inclination. Similar, if you want to move a heavy object up, you use a ramp. The nature of the spinning wheel allows this feat with an 'invisible ramp'. The heavy spinning wheel follows a curved, inclined path, which allows a smaller force to be used. However, energy is conserved, the length of path times the applied force equals m*g*h, the gravitational potential energy.

In a similar way, if you want an airplane to climb up into the air, the vortex effect around the wings would keep the airplane at level forever if it weren't for friction. So this offsets the weight of the plane. And that is no 'anti gravity' it is similar to buoyancy like in a hot air balloon. Instead of the displacement of hot, less-dense air, you have a large vortex which provides this buoyancy. The air supports the airplane, this won't work in vacuum! Now you only need to apply a small force to push the plane on a long path upward. The glide angle of a good sailplane can be incredibly small (~2 degrees!).

I was always interested in outsiders, since they challenge the established 'knowledge'. So I also looked at the 'Searl Effect', I saw on German TV this Mr. Searl that supposedly was building a flying saucer. This was when I was still in high school. Then much later there was an article in a magazine about him and I spent some time trying to figure out how he could supposedly generate anti-gravity. At the time, I was in my studies for my Master's in physics in Aachen, Germany and I wondered how spinning discs could generate high magnetic fields, I found out something similar to the Barnett effect, but you had to spin a disk to speeds where the outer edge would be spinning close to the speed of light... Not possible. Except, maybe, in the accretion disks of rotating black holes... I sent Searl a letter with my math, later I saw that in a letter that he published, he was referring to my math that it proved that he was right, that is when I gave up on him, I did no such thing. This whole Searl-effect stuff never got anywhere. There have been numerous replications and some supposedly showed a positive effect but can that be scientifically verified? And based on what physical principal? Another one is the effect discovered by the Russian scientist Dr. Eugene Potkletnov and the astounding 'Gravity Shielding' effect, even NASA looked into it but weren't able to replicate. Either these are all well-meant experiments that were somehow flawed by bad measurements or artifacts or there is still something that we just have no clue about it (yet).

However, I think there is no need to discuss the effect of flying any further, it is a combination of the Bernoulli effect and Newton's law.

Thanks for the input!
Do you have any links to visualizing this vortex effect.
I thought this was interesting about birds

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jKokxPRtck

 

[StephanF]

Thanks for the input!
Do you have any links to visualizing this vortex effect.
I thought this was interesting about birds

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jKokxPRtck

The vortex effect is best shown through the Magnus effect:

Magnus effect - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

The flow over a wing, mathematically, is a superposition of a vortex and a linear flow. I learned that back in the 1980s when I studied area- and fluid dynamics:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kutta–Joukowski_theorem

And of course the Scientific American article, mentioned before, where the momentum exchange was add.

 

[Drareg]

The vortex effect is best shown through the Magnus effect:

Magnus effect - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

The flow over a wing, mathematically, is a superposition of a vortex and a linear flow. I learned that back in the 1980s when I studied area- and fluid dynamics:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kutta–Joukowski_theorem

And of course the Scientific American article, mentioned before, where the momentum exchange was add.

Thanks.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNn2e9fCVSs

 

[Drareg]

I found this quote online-

"Sounds extremely convincing. But, I think there is a slight fallacy in the argument. It mentions nothing about the nature of the force involved, so it looks like it should work with any kind of force! However, it is not quite true. If we lived on a world where the 'falling' was due to electrical forces, and objects had masses and permanent charges, things would be different. Things with zero charge would not fall no matter what their mass is. In fact, the falling rate would be proportional to q/m, where q is the charge and m is the mass. When you tie two objects, 1 and 2, with charges q1, q2, and m1, m2, the combined object will fall at a rate (q1+q2)/(m1+m2). Assuming q1/m1 < q2/m2, or object 2 falls faster than object one, the combined object will fall at an intermediate rate (this can be shown easily). But, there is another point. The 'weight' of an object is the force acting on it. That is just proportional to q, the charge. Since what matters for the falling rate is q/m, the weight will have no definite relation to rate of fall. In fact, you could have a zero-mass object with charge q, which will fall infinitely fast, or an infinite-mass object with charge q, which will not fall at all, but they will 'weigh' the same! So, in fact, the original argument should be reduced to the following statement, which is more accurate:

If all objects which have equal weight fall at the same rate, then _all_ objects will fall at the same rate, regardless of their weigh

 

[Drareg]

Wingless Electromagnetic Air Vehicle​

Wingless Electromagnetic Air Vehicle | The Lyncean Group of San Diego

When charged molecules in the air are subjected to an electric field, they are accelerated. When these charged molecules collide with neutral ones, they transfer part of their momentum, leading to air movement known as an “ionic wind.” This basic process is shown in the following diagram, which depicts a strong electric field between a discharge electrode (left) and a ground electrode (right), and the motion of negative ions toward the ground electrode where they are collected. The neutral molecules pass through the ground electrode and generate the thrust called the ionic wind.

 

[StephanF]

I found this quote online-

"Sounds extremely convincing. But, I think there is a slight fallacy in the argument. It mentions nothing about the nature of the force involved, so it looks like it should work with any kind of force! However, it is not quite true. If we lived on a world where the 'falling' was due to electrical forces, and objects had masses and permanent charges, things would be different. Things with zero charge would not fall no matter what their mass is. In fact, the falling rate would be proportional to q/m, where q is the charge and m is the mass. When you tie two objects, 1 and 2, with charges q1, q2, and m1, m2, the combined object will fall at a rate (q1+q2)/(m1+m2). Assuming q1/m1 < q2/m2, or object 2 falls faster than object one, the combined object will fall at an intermediate rate (this can be shown easily). But, there is another point. The 'weight' of an object is the force acting on it. That is just proportional to q, the charge. Since what matters for the falling rate is q/m, the weight will have no definite relation to rate of fall. In fact, you could have a zero-mass object with charge q, which will fall infinitely fast, or an infinite-mass object with charge q, which will not fall at all, but they will 'weigh' the same! So, in fact, the original argument should be reduced to the following statement, which is more accurate:

If all objects which have equal weight fall at the same rate, then _all_ objects will fall at the same rate, regardless of their weigh

I don't want to give a whole lecture on physics here. The gravitational force is NOT an electrical force. We did this experiment back in my high school years (back in Germany), it was an experimental device to demonstrate the gravitational force between lead spheres, two maybe with a diameter of 3" and two smaller ones. The large ones were stationary, the smaller ones were suspended on a fine torsion wire. A tiny mirror was attached to the suspended lead balls and a laser pointer was reflected off the mirror and traveled some distance to the end of the classroom. When the teacher changed the position of the fixed spheres to the ones that was suspended, you could record a deflection. From this simple experiment, we obtained an approximate value for the gravitational force constant, which was close to the published number.

Cavendish Experiment

Calculation of gravitational constant, with accompanying apparatus model. What it shows The gravitational attraction between lead spheres. The data from the demonstration can also be used to calculate the universal gravitational constant G.

sciencedemonstrations.fas.harvard.edu

The lead balls were not charged. In fact, you had to make sure that there was an electrical connection between the two lead balls, and the setup was also grounded (see the grounding wire in the picture in the above link!), since even a small surface charge could mess up the experiment. The electrical force is by orders of magnitudes stronger than the weak gravitational force, however, the electrical charge is neutralized in matter, in fact the cancellation is exact due to the exact opposite charge of electrons and protons. The gravitational force does not possess a polarity and therefore is accumulative, it adds up. That's why there are black holes!

The earth has a fair weather potential (negative) but any force (except the flying spider suspended by a charged spider thread) on larger objects is negligible with respect to the gravitational attraction. AND the gravitational force is solely proportional to the mass between two objects. The electrical force, in order to be attractive, has to have OPPOSITE charges on two charge carrying objects. As soon as two oppositely charged objects become in electrical contact, the charge is neutralized.

 

[Drareg]

View: https://youtu.be/yjV76JgUF8w

 

[Drareg]

Infrared light is all thats needed for this.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDx5misohrA