-Caveat Lector-
http://www.eurekalert.org/releases/ns-bnw120700.html
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: 7 DECEMBER 2000
UK Contact: Claire Bowles
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US Contact: New Scientist Washington office
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New Scientist
Bizarre new way to propel a spacecraft
If you thought warp drive was weird, try jolt propulsion
A JUDDERING magnet has inspired a scientist at the US Department of Energy
to investigate a bizarre new way of propelling a spacecraft.
The idea for a "judder-drive" struck David Goodwin when he noticed that
powerful cryogenically cooled superconducting magnets often jolt in one
direction for a centimetre or two when you first turn them on.
"If you have something metal in the magnetic field as it is forming, you
see the magnet physically shift," Goodwin, who works at the Office of High
Energy and Nuclear Physics in Germantown, Maryland, told New Scientist.
Superconducting magnets are cooled to such a low temperature that they have
no electrical resistance. Goodwin's magnets were made by taking
superconducting wires of niobium-tin alloy and twisting the strands into a
cable. The cables were then coated with an insulator and wound into a coil.
"The coil's then put into a cylindrical casing called a cryostat that's
filled with liquid helium," says Goodwin. The liquid helium cools the wire
coil to -269 ˇC, when they become superconducting.
Goodwin says the metal objects create the judder effect by inducing a
"brief asymmetry in the magnetic field" as it is set up when the magnet is
turned on. This initial disturbance of the magnetic field, he says, creates
a repulsive force on the magnet and pushes it away. But the force produced
in one jolt is very low, Goodwin says, so you would need to turn the magnet
on and off with ultrafast switches, making a fast stream of jolts. "We've
got switches now that can work at high voltages at 400,000 times a second,"
he says. "If you could use one of these switches to rapidly switch the
magnet on and off, you might get some propulsion out of it."
A colleague of Goodwin's at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York is
now modelling the magnetic field of superconducting magnets to work out how
best to arrange a metallic disc in the magnetic field to produce the
biggest jolt. But Goodwin admits the judder drive might be going nowhere
fast. "It's very speculative. We don't know if it'll work," he says. Marc
Millis, who heads
NASA's breakthrough propulsion physics project at the NASA Glenn Research
Center at Lewis Field in Cleveland, Ohio, has invited Goodwin to present
his idea at a propulsion conference in July next year.
The crucial thing, says Millis, is whether Goodwin's magnet would produce
any net motion at all-it might just sit there and vibrate. "It's a
definite possibility that any forces arising from Goodwin's concept will
only act within the components of the device itself, resulting in no net
force," he says. "There are a lot of unresolved physics issues to address."
###
Author: Ian Sample, London
New Scientist issue: 9th December 2000
SOURCE - NEW SCIENTIST, http://www.newscientist.com
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