how can i make a toy plasma thruster that actually works???
Youtube video: Plasma thruster:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=s_wwEKp6SGk
10
comments
|
Add Comment
|
Hope it helps.
First you need some kind of fuel to ionize. Air is convenient and plentiful. Just having air is not enough. You either need to have a blower, or a compressed air source to keep enough air flowing that the plasma stream won't move and eat your rocket.
Now that you have air, you need a high voltage continuous power source. By high voltage, I mean several hundred volts to start, many plasma torches use 400vdc.
Once you have air and power, you need a nozzle to handle the air and voltage and survive the plasma. If your rocket cannot contain the plasma for any time, it will just catch fire, and maybe explode. In many plasma torches they use an electric spark fired from an electrode into the grounded work surface to create the plasma. Air is injected twice through this nozzle, once through the spark to ignite and create plasma, and once AROUND the plasma to keep it from eating the rest of the nozzle. This also serves to keep the nozzle cool and not melt so fast.
You cannot use that method, as you have no grounded surface to touch. That being the case, you need to create a spark perpendicular (Intersecting at a right angle) to the flow of air. This will cause the air to ignite into plasma, and expand like fuel dumped into a jet engine in afterburn. The longer you can contain this plasma, the more thrust it will provide.
Please understand that plasma WILL try to get away from you. It has high magnetic fields and they are pretty random. This will "Push" the stream in different directions, and so this is inherently dangerous. If the plasma makes contact with any surface, it will eat it rapidly.
The water is zapped into charged plasma, flowing between the electrodes.
Under the white material (a sheet of PTFE) are a pair of magnets. The charged plasma is pushed by the magnets in exactly the same way as a charge-carrying wire is pushed inside a motor.
All of which you would have found if you had followed the link to the thruster maker's site.
For a similar process that uses lower voltage but achieves vaguely-useful thrust is the magnetohydrodynamic effect (sometimes known as a "caterpillar drive"), which uses water in the place of plasma.
Like this little toy from EMS:
![]() |
















Vancouver Mini Maker Faire 2012
Rebuilding NordicTrack ski machine drive rollers
Looking for New Zealand-based Instructables authors for conference on August 27 in Wellington
Call to makers - Brighton Mini Maker Faire
Milk Crates - not as green as you think
TEDxBaghdad - Iraq - violence, dust storms and open sourced manufacturing
UK Mini Maker Faire - The Derby Silk Mill - New Poster to Share!







