Drareg
Member
- Joined
- Feb 18, 2016
- Messages
- 4,772
...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.
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
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