Designing a Futuristic Magnetic Turbine (MHD drive)

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Let's make a big one together.

Just a tip for your demonstrations, try adding fine mica powder to the water instead of ink. The mica shows flow and looks really cool, but most importantly it shows basically every detail of turbulence, flow and direction very clearly. (Think of those cool paint mixing videos with the insane swirls and colors.) and they come in basically any color and you only need to add it once and it will just continue to work without constantly adding dye or particulates. We used this technique in school when we learned about fluid dynamics and I use them all the time for resin work, so they’re readily available now because of the popularity of epoxy crafting.

from the data presented here, you can easily calculate the efficiency to be 0.12%. A ship propeller has a hydrodynamic efficiency of about 60%. That is a factor of 500. There is much more Energy in the electrolysis, and electrolysis is needed for the current.

The lack of rotating components is actually a great feature of the turbine considering how damage prone a high speed propeller is to light impacts. This would also minimise marine wildlife incidents where props end up cutting and harming marine life. It also means that there would be significantly less maintenance and manufacturing requirement, and being sealed off as one part is a very good trait for something designed to be leakproof

I’d like to see a boat, but even more a comparison of efficiency between propellers and your drive.

These would seem more interesting on a submarine rather than a boat especially since you could have them articulate in any direction for better 3d movement compared to a propellor

Invented 1966 and tested with an submarine EMS-1 at the coast of California... Also Mitshubishi worked on it in the 1980-90s. They need about 4 Tesla to make it work. Probably does not work with sweet water rivers.

Oh man, a boat with these things would be awesome! Not sure if you meant toy/model boat or something bigger, but it'd be neat to see how many it takes to move a canoe or something small-but-mannable

That's awesome! Also I think you just gave me an idea

My first thought..."one ping only" 😂 can't beat that caterpillar drive

The power of Red October. Thank you, great video

The one thing that i am not really sure about this idea is that you could actually see the dye shift colours (a possible indication of pH change as Sodium Hydroxide is being produced trough the electrolysis of salt water). Also, the chlorine produced gets bond to the sodium Hydroxide to make sodium chlorate. Not sure if alot of ships using this technology would produce significant amounts of either sodium Hydroxide or Sodium Chlorate thst could affect marine life. I mean sodium Hydroxide is corrosive to metal and skin

Have you considered electromagnets for this purpose? It would make it harder to repair since you now have a bunch of wires sticking through the outer casing but may provide a benefit in strength of the magnetic field and resultant thrust. Individual control of these could also possibly provide thrust vectoring without movement of the nozzles?

Yeah man definitely build the boat, this is sick.

It's brilliant because it's simple...well done jedi.

Great video! A few suggestions. As there is no more moving parts in an MHD drive, you don't necessarily have to put the engine inside like a conventional motor. Instead, you can put the engine outside ;) i.e. deploy the MHD interaction everywhere around the external fuselage, making it an "external flow MHD accelerator" with the benefit of acting on the wavefront and the drag along the whole wetted area. Another trick: when you glue the same poles of two 1T magnets together, face-to-face, you nearly double the magnetic flux density and get almost a 2T magnetic field strength right on their junction plane. In addition, in order to avoid electrode corrosion due to electrolysis, it is best to use graphite electrodes, even if steel is better than cooper indeed. Speaking of electrolysis, you are limited by the conductivity of salt water: you could use an acidic bath instead and boost the induced flow velocity even further (except if your aim is to eventually test a boat or submersible down the road). What limits the efficiency of such a small drive is the relative weakness of the magnetic field, and the limited amount of current density that the fluid can bear before electrolysis becomes dominant up to the deleterious situation of thermal blockage, a phenomenon that could be compared to a conventional motor burning due to heat accumulated by the Joule effect (same mechanism). Therefore, you should use a power supply that controls direct current not voltage, to better tune the whole thing, and even calculate precisely the current density J your fluid can accept depending on its electrical conductivity and the surface of your electrodes. Indeed the Lorentz force acting on a fluid is a body force, a force per unit volume, in newtons per cubic meter (in SI units). That's also why the electromagnetic force J×B can be very powerful as it can act on a large volume of fluid. But this is another longer story and I was speaking of the efficiency. Compared to a traditional propeller, the magnetic field B of an MHD drive is akin to the pitch angle of the blades, while the current density J is the rotation speed. With such a low power magnetic field and electric current set too high wrt the fluid (its electrical conductivity), it's like someone who would use a propeller with blades having an infinitesimal pitch angle. He would have to rotate the propeller at an insane amount of RPMs to barely move. The main thing we're doing in this case is not propulsion, but heating the ambient fluid! That's why MHD drives appear so "inefficient". But they are not: they simply don't have the appropriate input values, as our technology is not yet advanced enough (hint: room-temperature superconducting multitesla electromagnets and powerful yet light and compact electrical power generators onboard).

Strangely I’ve recently been attracted to “playing with Magnets”… and the ideas start flowing on the possibilities of moving vehicles via Magnetism… and that’s what LED me here…. But wow you took it to a whole new level! Awesome Video! You’re way Advanced! 🧲 🙏

I'd be interested to see the thrust-to-weight ratio of the old and new designs. While it might cut down on noise, i cant imagine an engine that weighs more than its traditional counterpart without proportional thrust output will see widespread adoption . That said, i wonder if a multi-stage design would render any improvements like your plasma wing design. Whatever the case, i look forward to seeing what you come up with next!

Just came upon your channel and that was excellent. You put a lot of time, effort and funds into that thruster, and it exceeded expectations. I had to subscribe.