What is an ARFO ?

[Jones Beene]

What is an ARFO ? ...the escaped pet space-dog from a UFO? Not exactly. An ARFO is an Autonomous Remote Flying Object, but it looks (in my mental image) like a propeller-powered "glider" on steroids.   It is being designed (in the gray lab) to fly for a very long time, but does not have even enough power to take off. It is designed to remotely fly at very high altitude - over the jet stream, but still in the atmosphere, and not in orbit. Its purpose is to fly in tight-circles continuous over one spot on earth (preferably mid ocean), using computer control, for as long as decades, non-stop - as a high-altitude platform with many uses, military and non-military. It can hold a smaller Hubble-type telescope, or relay communications or broadcast TV over a whole hemisphere and for far less cost - less than a thousandth of the cost and 10 times the utility of comparative satellites. It has very long wings and large ungainly propellers that only work in thin air, and it is powered by radioactive material, so-called reactor waste.   It only has a few hundred horsepower, so it needs to be towed by another airplane up to modest altitude, with its oversized props folded away - before it can even be started-up, and from there on, it can only travel at about 75 MPH, relative to earth after deducting the headwind, but it can do this for decades, or until the mechanical parts of the engine wear out.   How does it work? Unlike the expensive Amtec-powered satellites which use radioactive Pu and thermoelectric converters, or the more expensive  SP-100 fission space-reactor, this plane uses only "free" material for power- the so-called "waste," from reactors, and it uses about 500 pounds of this material, solely for its substantial gamma emission - for use in the continuing thermo-radiolysis of steam - and the continuous onboard production of hydrogen.. Huh, that is nowhere to be found on Google. Yes. this is true... as this diamond-in-the-rough concept airplane is now only a Jules of the imagination (as in Verne) perhaps a too-active imagination, but think about this: You probably know something about radiolysis, and thermolysis, and SOFC (solid oxide fuel cells) and vortex tubes and adiabatics, but have you ever thought that these could all be combined? The aim is that steam could be partly decomposed, and continuously be recirculated in a two layered vortex tube configuration, where the split-off hydrogen is removed, and the remainder of oxy-enriched steam recycled - and recombined without normal heat rejection, so that most of the gamma energy of the fuel is converted to electricity.   Get this:... the walls of the vortex tube converters ARE the ceramic oxygen membrane of the SOFCs...and hydrogen comes off from the inner vortex reverse-flow-config when the steam is irradiated, and then is pumped back to the other side of the SOFC wall to give the current flow need to power the plane - get it?   More later.   Jules NuVerne      aerospace designer and resident court jester