China claims successful test of microwave relativity engine

[Solomon2]

Hey, wait a minute...this design can't work, as in a closed chamber there's no em emission so there's no net thrust. Smells like some sort of fraud here.

 

[neytirilover]

Hey, wait a minute...this design can't work, as in a closed chamber there's no em emission so there's no net thrust. Smells like some sort of fraud here.

I also mark this thing as unbelievable if without further proof, but after searching for a while, I found another published paper articulating its propulsion mechanism and numerical simulations. Links here(In Chinese): æ—*工质微波推进的推力转换机理与性能计算分析--《西北工业大å*¦å*¦æŠ¥ã€‹2010å¹´06期, Abstract only if you are not a subscribed member or your library haven't purchase this database.

I'm not an expert in this area, but NWPU has a very good research integrity reputation in China, and this project is funded by Chinese Official foundation NNSF(National Natural Science Foundation, I worked under support of this foundation a few years ago in China), I think it's worth further exploring before labeling it as a fraud anyway~~

As for my own experience, latest quantum physics theories has been stroking "the world" in my eyes heavily for a few times, I would personally welcome another shock anyway

 

[Dazzler]

By Evan Ackerman

Friday, February 8, 2013

Researchers in China say that they've successfully managed to test an engine that runs on electricity, requires no propellant and produces no exhaust. It's called the EmDrive, and it's able to convert microwave energy directly into thrust inside a sealed chamber. Oh, it's totally silent and highly efficient, too. If it seems too good to be true, well, you're not the only one who feels that way. But the researchers have a prototype that apparently works, and they've just published a paper detailing it.

Before we get into the mechanics of the EmDrive, let's give it some context. An engine is something that converts energy into motion. There are lots and lots of different ways of doing this, but let's take a look at a very simple one: a rocket engine. With a rocket engine, you've got a big tube with some explosive stuff (propellant) in it. When you launch the rocket and the propellant combusts, it tries to expand in all directions at once, but because it's stuck in a tube, it can only make it out the back. This means that the force that explosion exerts on the tube is symmetrical in every direction except for the back and the front, and as the propellant escapes out the back, the rocket gets pushed forward.

The basic principle here is that there's a reaction going on: stuff you don't care about (the exhaust) going one way pushes something that you do care about (the rocket) the other way. The reason that this works is a fundamental law of physics: Newton's Third Law, to be exact, which says that all forces exist in pairs. It also works because of the Law of Conservation of Momentum, which says that in a closed system, total momentum (which is the product of both mass and velocity) is constant. In other words, you can't have a rocket that moves forward without something moving backwards, and you also can't have a rocket that moves forward if you seal up the back end.

“According to the fundamental laws of physics, the universe should not allow it to work.”

This is why the engine that scientists in China are claming to have successfully tested is so crazy: According to the fundamental laws of physics, the universe should not allow it to work.

The basic operating principle of this engine was conceptualized by a British dude named Roger Shawyer several decades ago, and has been in the news over the last few years (including on DVICE) as Shawyer built prototypes. The EmDrive itself is simply a microwave resonating cavity in the form of a closed, truncated cone. You fire up a big electrically-powered microwave generator and start beaming microwaves inside this thing, and the microwaves bounce around all over the place, exerting radiation pressure on the inside of the cavity.

Here's a diagram we found on New Scientist:

Now, if we believe those pesky laws of physics, we'd say that the EmDrive won't be able to move anywhere, because the energy imparted by the microwaves bouncing off of the inside of the EmDrive will cancel out. There's no "exhaust."

However, if we believe Shawyer, the EmDrive is in fact able to extert a small amount of thrust that propels it towards the large side of the cone. Shawyer says this happens because inside the resonating cavity, the velocity of the microwaves changes significantly as the cavity diameter varies. The velocity changes enough, in fact, to exert a larger force on the larger end of the cavity, and a smaller force on the smaller end of the cavity, resulting in net thrust. Shawyer argues that this isn't a violation of anything, because you have to treat the electromagnetic wave itself as acting in a different reference frame than the cavity, in accordance with Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, meaning that the system is actually not closed.

A lot of people are skeptical about a lot of the physics here, and Shawyer has been called a nutcase by some people with extensive math and phyics backgrounds, but here's a video of the EmDrive purportedly moving itself on a test stand from back in 2007:

China claims successful test of microwave relativity engine | DVICE

The EmDrive is contained inside that box-like thing, and that's part of what makes this thing so crazy: since it's reactionless and doesn't have to breathe in air or exhaust anything, you can completely seal it up and it'll still work quite happily, thrusting away inside whatever you've stuffed it into. Put one in your sock drawer, and it'll start trying to lift your dresser. Swallow one, and it'll start trying to lift you. Heck, seal it up in a block of concrete, and as long as you feed it enough electric power, you'll have a block of concrete that you can make levitate.

We want to reiterate that there are apparently a lot of very good reasons why a drive like this absolutely shouldn't work, and the general consensus of the scientific community is that Shawyer's results are caused by something else and that the drive doesn't function like he thinks it does (or at all). Boeing's Phantom Works took a look at one of Shawyer's prototypes and didn't pursue it, and when that sort of thing happens, it's usually a pretty good sign that the thing doesn't function. If it functioned even a little tiny bit, you'd have to think that a company like Boeing would be all over it, right?

Still, researchers in China have developed Shawyer's design over the last several years. Yang Juan, Professor of Propulsion Theory and Engineering of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the Northwestern Polytechnic University in Xi'an, just published a paper entitled "Net thrust measurement of propellantless microwave thruster." In the paper, Yang describes an iteration of the EmDrive that's able to generate 72 grams of thrust with 2,500 watts of electricity. It doesn't sound like a huge amount, but if you compare it to the hands-down most efficient spacecraft engine we've got right now (where efficiency is at an absolute premium), an ion thruster, the Chinese EmDrive gets you four times as much thrust from half as much power without sucking down any fuel at all. Yeah, you need electricity, but electricity is cheap in space and cheaper on the ground. Anyway, you can read the paper here, and if you can make conclusive heads or tails of it, please do us all a favor and explain it in the comments.

“This would mean flying cars, it would mean highly efficient aircraft, it would mean cheap cargo to space.”

As skeptical as we are, let's just pretend for a second that the EmDrive is proven to work. What's the future like? Well, Shawyer says that with a superconducting cavity, the EmDrive could eventually be boosted to produce three tons of lift from just one kilowatt of input power. You could put them on anything you wanted to counteract gravity, while using conventional engines to provide high-impulse thrust. This would mean flying cars, it would mean highly efficient aircraft, it would mean cheap cargo to space. Gravity would cease to be a factor, requiring only renewable energy to counteract. It would be a fundamental and mind-blowing paradigm shift in all aspects of transportation.

We want to reiterate, again, that we have to side with physics on this one. The EmDrive is an extraordinary claim, and is going require extraordinary evidence and testing and demonstrations and we're absolutely not there yet. We're nowhere close. We've got some claims, some pictures of hardware, some YouTube video, and a paper published in China — and that's it. We need to see these things mailed to NASA and JPL and some major universities with no strings attached, and we need to see them perform there, and we need to see them getting built from scratch and working as advertised, and none of that is going to happen soon. The best we can reasonably hope for is a demonstration of the Chinese prototype at an aerospace conference sometime this year.

Now, having said all that, it's definitely hard to not get just a little bit excited about the potential here. I mean, even in science fiction reactionless drives are totally science fiction, and that's what we live for around here: science fiction becoming reality.

so Bob Lazar was not crazy afterall, you can put it in a UFO and wolla

 

[Mitro]

EmDrive: China's radical new space drive (Wired UK)

 

[gpit]

millinewtons

the article written by DVICE fucked up the original paper published by the Chinese Scientists @ College of Aeronautics, Northwestern Polytechnical Univeristy, Xi'an, Shaanxi province:

:

They are roughly the same.

720 millinewton = 0.72 newton = 0.072 kg (assuming g, the gravitational acceleration constant, = 10) = 72 grams.

Hey, wait a minute...this design can't work, as in a closed chamber there's no em emission so there's no net thrust. Smells like some sort of fraud here.

For classical Newton theory, you are right as all those EM forces are internal, but may not be true in Quantum and Relativity.

Remember in the classical theory, tunneling effect is a joke, yet people nowadays use lots of instruments based on the tunneling effect.

A little bit digression. Political analogy is that authoritarianism is a joke in US but works fine in China, so is democracy the other way around (so far).

 

[Solomon2]

For classical Newton theory, you are right as all those EM forces are internal, but may not be true in Quantum and Relativity.

The argument, "and then a miracle may occur -" is not a scientific one, nor is ignorance an excuse: at the macro scale and momentum space seen here quantum and relativity respectively reduce to classical electrodynamics.

I'm not an expert in this area, but NWPU has a very good research integrity reputation in China, and this project is funded by Chinese Official foundation NNSF(National Natural Science Foundation, I worked under support of this foundation a few years ago in China), I think it's worth further exploring before labeling it as a fraud anyway~~

The NWPU's reputation is worth a lot less now. I'm angry I was taken in, even for a moment.

 

[Developereo]

Hey, wait a minute...this design can't work, as in a closed chamber there's no em emission so there's no net thrust. Smells like some sort of fraud here.

The OP addresses that question specifically although I am still skeptical until more results are available.

 

[neytirilover]

The argument, "and then a miracle may occur -" is not a scientific one, nor is ignorance an excuse: at the macro scale and momentum space seen here quantum and relativity respectively reduce to classical electrodynamics.

Yeah, that is the major problem and the reason why this is controversial, an experienced physicist receives his education this way and it has been a consensus for almost a century, from a perceptual perspective I would also reject this claim. but I also think that the Clarke's Three Laws also makes a lotta sense~ One fact is, the force HAS been measured, if this is true, than only two ways to disprove it: to prove that the way in which the force is measured is wrong, or to prove that this force is generated from another source.

The NWPU's reputation is worth a lot less now. I'm angry I was taken in, even for a moment.

I would like to personally hear from you about your bad experience with NWPU~

 

[alibaz]

It's a a propellantless microwave thruster that defies Newton's laws of motion

Chinese scientists have taken on a heavily criticized space drive idea that could one day launch satellites, deep space probes and even flying cars.

The research team hails from Northwestern Polytechnic University in Xi'an, and was led by Yang Juan. What they developed was a propellantless microwave thruster called EmDrive, which is a controversial idea because it goes against Newton's laws of motion -- and many have claimed to create a "propellantless" thruster before and failed.
Newton's laws of motion are all based on the idea that firing propellant out of the back at a high speed will push a craft forward. While solar cells offer infinite power, thrust is limited by propellant. Many have tried to get around this, but several scams have made this particular field a joke in the scientific world.

While space drives tend to rely on Newton's laws of motion, the EmDrive is a closed, conical container that has a net thrust toward the wide end when filled with resonating microwaves. This goes against Newton, who said that no closed system could have a net thrust. However, EmDrive works because the microwaves have a group velocity (the speed of a collection of electromagnetic waves) that is greater in one direction than the other -- which is where Albert Einstein's theory of relativity comes in.

British engineer Robert Shaywer, who began looking at the concept of a propellantless thruster when he opened his own company called Satellite Propulsion Research in 2001, is the original creator of the EmDrive. He made demonstration thrusters to prove it could be done, and even made sure the test results were accurate (meaning, the results weren't affected by friction, ionization, air currents, electromagnetic effects or interference). The first, made in 2003, had a thrust of 16 mN. This was enough to show it could be done.

However, he received a ton of criticism for his idea and was ridiculed in his own country. But the Chinese team at Northwestern Polytechnic University believed in his research and took the project head on to author the latest study, "Net Thrust Measurement of Propellantless Microwave Thruster."

The Northwestern Polytechnic University team was able to create the EmDrive with 720 mN of thrust with a couple of kilowatts of power.

So what purpose does EmDrive have? It could halve launch costs of satellites because as much as half the launch weight of these objects are attributed to propellant.

Shawyer is even working on a superconducting thruster that could be ready as soon as 2016. It would boost the Q value of the cavity, which determines the amount of thrust produced. He said it could be boosted by a factor of several thousand, possibly equating to a tonne of thrust per kilowatt of power.


DailyTech - Propellantless Space Drive Called "EmDrive" Made in China

 

[shuttler]

They are roughly the same.

720 millinewton = 0.72 newton = 0.072 kg (assuming g, the gravitational acceleration constant, = 10) = 72 grams.

better explained in Newton unit

For classical Newton theory, you are right as all those EM forces are internal, but may not be true in Quantum and Relativity.

Remember in the classical theory, tunneling effect is a joke, yet people nowadays use lots of instruments based on the tunneling effect.

that is what has made the discovery amazing as it did provide result of measurable thrust!

The argument, "and then a miracle may occur -" is not a scientific one, nor is ignorance an excuse: at the macro scale and momentum space seen here quantum and relativity respectively reduce to classical electrodynamics.

that is the magic of science and the paper did show a concrete result. You can create an experiment to refute its finding but solid argument is not built on hot air.

The NWPU's reputation is worth a lot less now. I'm angry I was taken in, even for a moment.

how were you ”taken-in“ other than some clueless babbling!

 

[Astra-2013]

By Evan Ackerman

Friday, February 8, 2013

Researchers in China say that they've successfully managed to test an engine that runs on electricity, requires no propellant and produces no exhaust. It's called the EmDrive, and it's able to convert microwave energy directly into thrust inside a sealed chamber. Oh, it's totally silent and highly efficient, too. If it seems too good to be true, well, you're not the only one who feels that way. But the researchers have a prototype that apparently works, and they've just published a paper detailing it.

Before we get into the mechanics of the EmDrive, let's give it some context. An engine is something that converts energy into motion. There are lots and lots of different ways of doing this, but let's take a look at a very simple one: a rocket engine. With a rocket engine, you've got a big tube with some explosive stuff (propellant) in it. When you launch the rocket and the propellant combusts, it tries to expand in all directions at once, but because it's stuck in a tube, it can only make it out the back. This means that the force that explosion exerts on the tube is symmetrical in every direction except for the back and the front, and as the propellant escapes out the back, the rocket gets pushed forward.

The basic principle here is that there's a reaction going on: stuff you don't care about (the exhaust) going one way pushes something that you do care about (the rocket) the other way. The reason that this works is a fundamental law of physics: Newton's Third Law, to be exact, which says that all forces exist in pairs. It also works because of the Law of Conservation of Momentum, which says that in a closed system, total momentum (which is the product of both mass and velocity) is constant. In other words, you can't have a rocket that moves forward without something moving backwards, and you also can't have a rocket that moves forward if you seal up the back end.

“According to the fundamental laws of physics, the universe should not allow it to work.”

This is why the engine that scientists in China are claming to have successfully tested is so crazy: According to the fundamental laws of physics, the universe should not allow it to work.

The basic operating principle of this engine was conceptualized by a British dude named Roger Shawyer several decades ago, and has been in the news over the last few years (including on DVICE) as Shawyer built prototypes. The EmDrive itself is simply a microwave resonating cavity in the form of a closed, truncated cone. You fire up a big electrically-powered microwave generator and start beaming microwaves inside this thing, and the microwaves bounce around all over the place, exerting radiation pressure on the inside of the cavity.

Here's a diagram we found on New Scientist:

Now, if we believe those pesky laws of physics, we'd say that the EmDrive won't be able to move anywhere, because the energy imparted by the microwaves bouncing off of the inside of the EmDrive will cancel out. There's no "exhaust."

However, if we believe Shawyer, the EmDrive is in fact able to extert a small amount of thrust that propels it towards the large side of the cone. Shawyer says this happens because inside the resonating cavity, the velocity of the microwaves changes significantly as the cavity diameter varies. The velocity changes enough, in fact, to exert a larger force on the larger end of the cavity, and a smaller force on the smaller end of the cavity, resulting in net thrust. Shawyer argues that this isn't a violation of anything, because you have to treat the electromagnetic wave itself as acting in a different reference frame than the cavity, in accordance with Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, meaning that the system is actually not closed.

A lot of people are skeptical about a lot of the physics here, and Shawyer has been called a nutcase by some people with extensive math and phyics backgrounds, but here's a video of the EmDrive purportedly moving itself on a test stand from back in 2007:

China claims successful test of microwave relativity engine | DVICE

The EmDrive is contained inside that box-like thing, and that's part of what makes this thing so crazy: since it's reactionless and doesn't have to breathe in air or exhaust anything, you can completely seal it up and it'll still work quite happily, thrusting away inside whatever you've stuffed it into. Put one in your sock drawer, and it'll start trying to lift your dresser. Swallow one, and it'll start trying to lift you. Heck, seal it up in a block of concrete, and as long as you feed it enough electric power, you'll have a block of concrete that you can make levitate.

We want to reiterate that there are apparently a lot of very good reasons why a drive like this absolutely shouldn't work, and the general consensus of the scientific community is that Shawyer's results are caused by something else and that the drive doesn't function like he thinks it does (or at all). Boeing's Phantom Works took a look at one of Shawyer's prototypes and didn't pursue it, and when that sort of thing happens, it's usually a pretty good sign that the thing doesn't function. If it functioned even a little tiny bit, you'd have to think that a company like Boeing would be all over it, right?

Still, researchers in China have developed Shawyer's design over the last several years. Yang Juan, Professor of Propulsion Theory and Engineering of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the Northwestern Polytechnic University in Xi'an, just published a paper entitled "Net thrust measurement of propellantless microwave thruster." In the paper, Yang describes an iteration of the EmDrive that's able to generate 72 grams of thrust with 2,500 watts of electricity. It doesn't sound like a huge amount, but if you compare it to the hands-down most efficient spacecraft engine we've got right now (where efficiency is at an absolute premium), an ion thruster, the Chinese EmDrive gets you four times as much thrust from half as much power without sucking down any fuel at all. Yeah, you need electricity, but electricity is cheap in space and cheaper on the ground. Anyway, you can read the paper here, and if you can make conclusive heads or tails of it, please do us all a favor and explain it in the comments.

“This would mean flying cars, it would mean highly efficient aircraft, it would mean cheap cargo to space.”

As skeptical as we are, let's just pretend for a second that the EmDrive is proven to work. What's the future like? Well, Shawyer says that with a superconducting cavity, the EmDrive could eventually be boosted to produce three tons of lift from just one kilowatt of input power. You could put them on anything you wanted to counteract gravity, while using conventional engines to provide high-impulse thrust. This would mean flying cars, it would mean highly efficient aircraft, it would mean cheap cargo to space. Gravity would cease to be a factor, requiring only renewable energy to counteract. It would be a fundamental and mind-blowing paradigm shift in all aspects of transportation.

We want to reiterate, again, that we have to side with physics on this one. The EmDrive is an extraordinary claim, and is going require extraordinary evidence and testing and demonstrations and we're absolutely not there yet. We're nowhere close. We've got some claims, some pictures of hardware, some YouTube video, and a paper published in China — and that's it. We need to see these things mailed to NASA and JPL and some major universities with no strings attached, and we need to see them perform there, and we need to see them getting built from scratch and working as advertised, and none of that is going to happen soon. The best we can reasonably hope for is a demonstration of the Chinese prototype at an aerospace conference sometime this year.

Now, having said all that, it's definitely hard to not get just a little bit excited about the potential here. I mean, even in science fiction reactionless drives are totally science fiction, and that's what we live for around here: science fiction becoming reality.

you all believing this ****..........i think no serious Physics student here on this forum.
ok i will explain it why it can't generate force...i am drawing some pics to explain.

but simple reason is here the method they are assuming is that pump some microwaves in a tube that have one end area greater
than other so em wave will exert greater force on one end more than other so net force will be in the direction on greater area.(De brogli duality principle..... remember EM waves exerts force when deflected from a surfaces....because every thing behaves as wave as well as matter at the same time.) This is there theory

now the flaw in this is they are only seeing areas on the end of tube but if a tube is wider on one side than other than normal to sides surface will not be perpendicular to axis of tube so when EM wave will reflect from sides it will exert some force on side surface in the direction of normal which is not perpendicular to tube axis some component of that force will come in the direction
of tube axis this will add up to the difference in forces on the end ares SO NO THRUST WILL BE THERE

Actually this slanted tube make excellent tricky problems in fluid mechanics which most average student of the physics cant get because they see problem form the surface not in depth.

 

[neytirilover]

you all believing this ****..........i think no serious Physics student here on this forum.
ok i will explain it why it can't generate force...i am drawing some pics to explain.

but simple reason is here the method they are assuming is that pump some microwaves in a tube that have one end area greater
than other so em wave will exert greater force on one end more than other so net force will be in the direction on greater area.(De brogli duality principle..... remember EM waves exerts force when deflected from a surfaces....because every thing behaves as wave as well as matter at the same time.) This is there theory

now the flaw in this is they are only seeing areas on the end of tube but if a tube is wider on one side than other than normal to sides surface will not be perpendicular to axis of tube so when EM wave will reflect from sides it will exert some force on side surface in the direction of normal which is not perpendicular to tube axis some component of that force will come in the direction
of tube axis this will add up to the difference in forces on the end ares SO NO THRUST WILL BE THERE

Actually this slanted tube make excellent tricky problems in fluid mechanics which most average student of the physics cant get because they see problem form the surface not in depth.

And by your explanation you are ASSUMING that the editor board of an SCI/EI journal ACTA PHYSICA SINICA and those professors that are doing blind reviewing of this paper are basicly morons who don't understand high school physics?

I'm working on Computational Fluid Dynamics, so I'm not professional in this field, but I do know that this is far more complicated than those mechanical principles you are using in fluid mechanics problems. It's something related to quantum physics and relativity. One thing I could remind you according to my limited knowledge of this field is that changing of the physical dimension (diameter) of the microwave resonant chamber has a vital influence on the microwave resonant frequency, thus has an impact to the electromagnetic pressure gradient along the surfaces of the chamber. So this basicly complicates the situation.

 

[Astra-2013]

look at this image

image ru

 

[Astra-2013]

And by your explanation you are ASSUMING that the editor board of an SCI/EI journal ACTA PHYSICA SINICA and those professors that are doing blind reviewing of this paper are basicly morons who don't understand high school physics?

I'm working on Computational Fluid Dynamics, so I'm not professional in this field, but I do know that this is far more complicated than those mechanical principles you are using in fluid mechanics problems. It's something related to quantum physics and relativity. One thing I could remind you according to my limited knowledge of this field is that changing of the physical dimension (diameter) of the microwave resonant chamber has a vital influence on the microwave resonant frequency, thus has an impact to the electromagnetic pressure gradient along the surfaces of the chamber. So this basicly complicates the situation.

so you thing all papers published or accepted by journals are conceptually right or valid then you know very little about journal publishing.......take a look at below links

Nonsense paper accepted by mathematics journal
Random paper generator fools conference organizers

ever heard of Random paper generators

SCIgen is a Random CS paper generator designed by MIT students(by using it even u can write a paper on random topic ) it fooled many reputed journals and conferences. link SCIgen - An Automatic CS Paper Generator

MATHgen is for maths random papers. like this u can even generate physics papers.

 

[Astra-2013]

using SCIgen i right now wrote a paper with Isaac newton u also try it is fun.
Topic - Decoupling Smalltalk from Lambda Calculus in Online Algorithms
take a look at my paper and i dare some Computer science student to find some fault . and now i going to submit it for some conference.

scimakelatex.92142.Astra-2013.Sir+Isaac+Newton.pdf