woo that's a success this is both a wing and an ionic Thruster in one and it might just be a step in the right direction you see for the better part of a year I've been trying to optimize an ionic Thruster for flight and after I designed my first BSI Thruster it set in motion a transatlantic battle responding across the ocean my friend and fellow Creator Joel designed his own ionic Thruster one which worked really well and quite frankly outperformed mine so I bounced back with my BSI Mark I which moved twice as much air at twice the velocity refusing to kneel to an American Joel responded with a second design of his own one that was brilliantly simple and compact all this back and forth while super great for competitive Innovation led me to wonder if we're even on the right path look to design a no moving part ionic thrust airplane which is my goal we need to minimize weight and components not the other way around and maybe the best way to do that is to incorporate ionic thrusters into the wings themselves well I know a thing or two about plasma and Peter SLE he knows a thing or two about wings he's built in flown planes for a decade so after we shared thoughts I got to work designing an ultra lightwing design with built-in thrusters printing several iterations and finally arriving at a weight and power that offered some [Music] promise this video is sponsored by curiosity stream to fully understand this ionic thrust Wing idea we need to go back a few months to when the days were full of photons ethanol and bad decisions I was watching the Blue Angels over Lake Washington and In a Moment of clarity I realized that modern fighter jets aren't airplanes with jet engines attached they basically rjet engines with wings attached the thrust component is incorporated into the structure of the airplane itself so I thought what if we incorporate ionic thrust into the frame of a glider glider wings are huge designed to create lift from really slow speed seeds and might offer the best testing platform after a few cups of bean water at my favorite Cafe and conversations with a Fuzzy Friend I sketched up something that might just have potential wings and airframe design really aren't something I have that much experience in I do understand the basics uh and that's about it luckily when I was at Open sauce in San Francisco I met a variety of other creators one in particular who can make anything fly and I do mean anything for example this is his Dremel powered helicopter a leaf blower powered airplane which actually flew quite nicely a PC fan powered ultralight plane and this is a hand drill powered plane he also attempted to build an airplane entirely out of food which flew for about 17 milliseconds and then tried to fight the earth I figured he'd have great Insight on how to get this project off the ground so to speak uh yeah so we chatted for a bit you recall the picture that I sent you yeah it has to be a glider format right like it has to be a slow moving Big Air foil very slow moving air foil but it's also going to be um very low Wing loading but it's going to have a huge aspect ratio so very very large wings large slender wings okay would you be interested in coming up with a specific air foil design or aspect ratio that you think would be best I will have some stuff to send your way at least with an airf Choice yeah because I going to look at some of those uh super light rire airplanes that they do I want to see if our approach on the top of the wing is better or worse so okay this is going to be like n out of 10 on the hard scale that's good to know from what I gathered building a functional ionic thrust Wing was plausible but going to be super difficult but you know what that's uh never really stopped my engineering attempts before and as this one guy used to say we choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things not because they are easy but because they are hard luckily Peter shot over some air foil designs which were designed for low speeded flight and that gave me a starting point prior to building an entire ionic thrust Wing it's smart to focus on a small section of the wing first and then optimize the design from there so I focused my time on a 12 CM section of wing minimizing the weight and then maximizing the ionic [Music] thrust [Music] so there's a story here this is a creality printer I was given at op sauce it works great well prussa from prussa printers was there and autographed it as a sign of rebellion absolutely [Music] Savage [Music] [Music] here's what I'm working with it's a 4in section of wing with four mini air foils up top the leading edges those are all covered in aluminum foil tape that's the electrical ground and I don't know if you see the razor blades on the trailing Edge those are the high voltage positive um each air foil can slide forward and backwards about a/4 of an inch this allows me to test various spacing distances to see what provides the best thrust if my ionic thrusters from the past have taught me anything it's that closer spacing will have best results for power I'll be using using these stun gun modules which put out a familyfriendly 30,000 [Music] volts I'm going to test three different spacings under one configuration the first Gap is 9 mm middle 11 and back Gap 13 mm okay 9 mil feels really weak wow what about velocity04 m a second that's really bad what about 11 feels a little bit stronger 5 m still sucks but it's better and this is 11 mil the longest Gap 6 that's not going to cut it h pretty terrible start and I know what you're thinking those tests weren't particularly accurate because the meter was a different distance from each segment you're correct um I also went ahead and tested every distance and every spacing and the max velocity I found was 6 m a second all right all right that worked about as well as my last relationship I seriously thought this design would do better than a half a meter a second that's not going to cut it hands down I think the issue might be the fact that the air foils Downstream are directly obstructing the air flow from the previous ionic thrust segment so I went back to the drawing board and completely redesigned the ionic thrust segments with this version the ground was completely out of the way of airflow feeling confident this would be an improvement I commanded my little prusa to print away and in a few minutes I had a new version the high voltage positive attaches to the razor up top and the ground is connected to these parts wrapped in foil the razor points into open air and the grounds aren't in the path of air flow I was really excited to test this what am I working with here ooh that's a huge jump already that's huge massive jump I'm working with 1.5 now that's a huge increase in velocity I want to see that air [Music] flow wow that's actually a lot of [Music] airflow I then modified the design further by replacing the foil covered plastic grounds with aluminum streamlined tubing this proved to be a good decision that's another Mild improvement with that I felt confident and assembled the wing in preparation for tests before further testing there's something to be said about keeping your mind fully engaged in learning even between projects and that's what I've been doing recently using curiosity stream packed full of award-winning original documentaries films shows and series that you pretty much can't find anywhere else curiosity stream has its bases covered with the focus on Science Tech and history curiosity stream is perfect for anyone who wants to learn their documentaries are really informative making it easy to just expand your knowledge on a variety of topics and its deep library of content doesn't stop at stem it also hits on nature music food and more so pretty much content for everybody you can watch this content on your TV computer or a mobile devices making it super easy to watch your favorite documentaries anytime anywhere and for me that means one thing space documentaries new content drops every week meaning there's always new stuff to watch and their plans are crazy affordable like less than $5 a month and that gives you access to thousands of hours of highquality documentaries and series go to curiositystream.com plasma or scan the QR code for unlimited access to the world's top documentaries and non-fiction series and for my fans use the promo code plasma to get 25% off on to some tests at this point I'd consider the Prototype section of the ionic thrust Wing complete but when it comes the testing I have no idea what the hell to expect will I get four separate sections each providing 1 and2 m a second in parallel or will they add in series and create four five 6 MERS a second of air flow in the trailing Direction that's what I'm really hoping for that's what I need for this to work so let's find out wiring each segment to its own power source I gave it power and crossed my fingers come on uh somehow it had become weaker a second test confirmed the same results this makes zero cents naturally the next approach was to try powering these segments in parallel with all rounds wired together and all positives wired together come on come on 23 25 27 3.0 I saw 3.2 in there 29 again there was a 31 this is a huge Improvement having power style figured out I wondered if decreasing segment spacing might make a difference in output as well so after a couple tests oh 3 four 35 the 3.2 turned into 3.5 at this point it occurred to me that testing airf flow at the edge of a table isn't that efficient with the wing segment sitting right on the edge little Eddy currents were going to develop behind the thickness of the table which would reduce the velocity output elevating the wing above the table would bring better results 3.7 4.4 4.3 I hit 4 m a second barely four but I'll take it and testing it with dry isolator backed up the Eddie current theory2 a look at that you can see two Eddie currents going right here feeding into the main stream a this really helped visualize air flow on the trailing end which gave me an idea for Leading Edge so what I hope to see with this setup is the dry ice fog being sucked over the air foil and then also weaving in between the ionic thrust segments that'll give a really good approximation and a good visualization of the air flowing through the system yeah you can see it that's amazing oh wow with 4 m a second established it was time to focus on the weight I was not excited for this part collectively the first design was pretty heavy all parts in it weighed 200 g so I went back and redesigned the air foil to be lighter and eliminate the need for acrylic sides it turned out super nicely and felt much lighter in my hand all parts in it now weighed 133 G which was a 33% reduction in weight considering the power source weigh 87 G I wanted to reduce the weight further bouncing back to on shape I removed as much plastic air foil as I could without sacrificing strength after about 10 hours of printing and curiously weighting I had a new air foil I could cover with thin plastic sheeting whereas the first air foil weighed 100 G this one was only 45 looking at the razor blades they were Overkill and led to ionic segments weighing in at 15 G replacing them with thinner blades serated ones at that and shortening the 3D printed frame led to a segment of only 10 G all parts in the new prototype weighed 100 G which was a 50% reduction in weight this was a huge deal so I gave it the dry ice treatment and the results were am amazing oh yeah man wooo that is super cool and here you can see the air drawn over the Leading Edge I love the fog display but wait until you see this Wing in the dark when powered up the wing glows an eerie Corona purple and time exposures do it complete Justice at this point I just wanted to see the wing move but providing freedom of movement for such a small section of wing that's still attached to its power source was going to be really difficult so after a few too many cups of bean water I came up with something that not only provides freedom of movement but also the measurement of thrust and velocity so a balance point an Armature power source and high voltage modules and ionic thrust Wing able to move freely from the ground and ready to be tested let's give it a try oh yeah it's working it's working this is really really interesting God this is so useful to see this is so interesting to watch just going around and around that's a success at Max Speed it reached just under 60 RPM and with a circumference of 2 m that's 2 m/ second not quite fast enough to fly but this is only a 12 CM section of wing with the wind resistance of 50 cm of Armature so essentially this goes 2 m/ second while dragging along dead weight which as I discovered is really painful to stop oh that hurt really bad oh oh okay here's the magic excluding the 202 G from the base the Armature weighs 522 75 G of that is the arm itself and the rest split between two masses one being 175 and the other 231 plus a balance weight they both rotate about an offset center with one arm being 29 cm and the other being 22 the Wing's final velocity is 2 m/s after 12 seconds of force being applied I tried to calculate the thrust for over an hour and after a few close attempts chat GPT had it pinned at 44 G honestly I went through tons of iterations and this Wing segment can be improved further for example using a higher current power source will increase velocity output and using wire instead of razor blades will shave off more weight I plan to incorporate these changes when I build out the full ionic thrust Wing make sure you subscribe to be kept up to date and leave your thoughts on this video down below because I love the feedback I'd like you to ask yourself is it possible we're on the precipice of a new era of flight a solid state airplane it's something that I'm super passionate about and I totally believe as possible and because of that we have to try thank you for watching and you stay classic see