...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
