There is a comment from Pubpeer [0] on this research [1] if anyone is curious:
"This is not the first flight of an ion-drive aircraft. Seversky was patenting and flying ionocraft in the 1960s [2], hobbyists have been building them for decades under the name "lifter", and a self-contained device that carries its own power supply was developed by Ethan Krauss in 2006.
MIT's device may be the first ionocraft to use wings for lift, however. The previous devices behaved more like helicopters than airplanes, and did not need wings to stay aloft."
So is this just MIT being MIT (overhyping everything) or did this guy and his team somehow miss all of this? Is our scientific knowledge really that scattered?
I'm not sure that the guy who patented this is considered a "serious" scientist. After all, he did patent a technology from the 60's.
Otherwise, this just seems to be MIT being MIT: creating a trivial improvement on an old technology (in this case, moving the boost converter onto the airplane to avoid a tether wire), and publicizing the hell out of it because it's cool.
Keep in mind that the MIT Press office != the professors at MIT. It's actually quite common for any University's press office to be clueless about the research being done at the university, and it is their job to make as big of a splash as possible.
This is much like the oft-cited issue that the reporters aren't responsible for the headlines --- that is picked by the editors to make as big of a splash as possible.
As far as "patenting a technology from the 60's", even an incremental improvement on an old idea is still patentable. The real test is whether the patent cited the prior art, and you can bet that MIT Press Office didn't read the patent application before breathlessly sending out the press release.
That is a good point. MIT professors are usually very aware of the context of their work and the actual contributions they are making. Nevertheless, the MIT press office is a particularly egregious organization in terms of its tendency to exaggerate - my dad's lab cured cancer about 10 times in the early 2000's if you believe the press releases.
In this case, I'm not sure the MIT professor was aware of the "crackpot" invention that effectively pre-empted him. Many professors don't read patents (and there are lots of reasons why they shouldn't), and I'm not sure there was a paper.
One thing about patents is that if an invention is obvious in light of other inventions, it might not be patentable. In this case, I'm pretty sure that this combination of a technology from the 60's, a boost converter, and a LiPo battery may be "obvious" given the prevalence of other drones: it is a combination of two past inventions that fit together naturally (a drone + a propulsion technology). Of course, it will take millions of dollars worth of arguing for someone to say either way.
> a trivial improvement on an old technology (in this case, moving the boost converter onto the airplane to avoid a tether wire)
I wouldn’t call building an airplane that doesn’t need to be connected to the ground by wires a minor improvement. This makes a fun gimmick into something potentially useful.
I'm baffled that MIT's PR is so cringeworthy. They had a priceless, universally recognized and irreplaceable brand and they are just trashing it with a sustained campaign of cheap clickbait seemingly aimed at a technologically ignorant audience. WTF? WHY? The Fools!
I very much doubt whether the MIT Press Office cares about what Hacker News thinks of their brand. What they do care about is what Sarah J. Student's parents think when they are trying to encourage their progency to attend Harvard vs Yale vs Stanford. And positive press is good towards achieving that mission, even if it is a bit click-baity. And since all universities are playing this game to one degree or another, it's asking quite a lot for one univesity to unilaterally agree to disarm.
The other "brand" that universities care about is the their reputation by their professor's peers when it comes to hiring the best talent for their departments, and with the granting agencies who are deciding which research proposals they should fund. And here, what matters is the peer-reviewed publications at various academic journals and conferences. Whether a university's press office puts out a press release, which then gets mangled by various newspapers, doesn't really have negative or positive effect when it comes to how a university's research work is measured by the People Who Really Matter --- namely, other professors and the people who dispense the cash. Hacker News falls into neither of these two categories.
University reputations have a few decades lag. MIT did it's greatest work in the 20th century. It's since brought in people attracted to fame, power, fortune, and, again, fame.
Harvard and MIT have a lot of clout, and it's partly because of how incredibly massive they are. The Harvard network has more professors than some universities have pupils, (above two-thousand). Consequently just the amount of output due to a large number of people working there gets it placed high up in rating indices and such.
It's tough to say if it can keep up with its reputation. In some ways this phenomenon is comparable to gentrification: the beauty and soul of a place sometimes dies when the people who made that place what it is are displaced, like how Somerville and Berlin changed/are changing. It makes no sense for someone to remain committed in an academic career track when they're paying the kind of rent they do when around MIT/Harvard area with the income they make, so I agree with you that it's no longer attracting the kind of people that made MIT what it once was.
There are some institutions, that not many know about yet, that I'm confident in a couple of decades everyone will know about like U of Copenhagen and KIT & U of Stuttgart in Germany, and I think some in the midwest (Purdue, UMich, etc.) will one day have their day to shine too.
MIT was established 161 years ago and Harvard was established 386 years ago, both young relative to Cambridge established 813 years ago and Oxford established 926 years ago. The clout of universities will ebb and flow, but I wouldn’t bet on 100+ year institutions losing their ability to attract talent anytime soon.
MIT lost its ability to attract talent about two decades ago. Talent wants to work their. The endowment is obscene, and they won't lose their ability to afford talent.
What they cant do is screen talent.
For faculty positions, the competition is extreme; around 1000:1. That lends itself to people who cheat the system. In this case, it means, at the very least, overselling results, baking data, and giving TED-style talks. In many cases, it results in much worse.
The extreme competition also drives off many people who just want to nerd.
MIT isn't going away anytime soon, but that's why I think the problems may be hard to fix. The culture is broken.
I agree - network effects predate the internet after all. As long as good universities keep producing talented graduates it will be hard to undermine their reputation. And I don't think ambitious people being driven towards certain universities for clout is a negative. I say this as someone who went to an increasingly recognized yet still underdog state school. Maybe instead of discarding MIT's reputation a nudge in the direction of increasing editorial oversight can suffice. Though sensationalism seems to be a prerequisite for visibility these days
I liked MIT when it was "increasingly recognized yet still underdog" a lot.
With ambitions, there are different levels:
- An ambitious scientist should be driven to make ambitious discoveries
- An ambitious scientist should not be driven to steal credit, fake results, hype, oversell, and defraud
MIT's culture changed over the past 20 years. High competition (e.g. 4:1) leads to the type of people who do good work. With insane competition (e.g. 1000:1), the only way to "win" is to cheat.
In Germany a lot of research is not done at the universities but at various institutes such as Max-Planck, Fraunhofer, Helmholtz, Leibniz and a lot more.
> University reputations have a few decades lag. MIT did it's greatest work in the 20th century. It's since brought in people attracted to fame, power, fortune, and, again, fame.
> I don't think it will dig itself out again.
Well the headline i believe is technically accurate. Given that lifter type devices are aircraft but not aeroplanes.
It's certainly an iteration rather than a complete revolution but seems like an important step. Certainly something like this would have more practical application, a basically silent drone that could fly over a battlefield would be a huge win.
I'd absolutely expect the guy and his team to know about prior work, but the article comes from the university "news office". In my experience university PR releases are always extremely overhyped, particularly from the elite universities.
Or perhaps, as is becoming pretty ubiquitous in tech: the people who communicate things don't have nearly as much understanding as the people who do them. It was not always this way, but it seems the communication department in an organization is becoming the dumping ground for people who flunked out of doing the hands-on hard work but for one reason or another, have some support to retain them.
Note: I'm not criticizing tech writing. Just what tech writing has become.
I dunno about the findings from the 60s, but non-moving rotors would not keep a helicopter in the air... so at least some progress.
It's not clear whether this thing can steer (by changing ion balance?), if this prototype can't but the concept might, or if it's forward only. If they can steer (change direction at will) without moving parts, that definitely sounds innovative.
I did the same! IIRC, I went off a design from the first edition of Electronic Gadgets for the Evil Genius[0]. Excellent book for the budding electronics hacker.
Lifters typically have a tether don’t they? So I think it depends on whether you consider the tether a moving part. It has to move for the craft to move…
A self contained unit like the MIT one is an improvement on the lifter, because the ion drive is itself an improvement on the lifter. Or at least, a production version of one. What they’ve done is get the mass to thrust ratio below a threshold that allows for flight in atmosphere. That’s definitely worth some points, but not all the points.
The tether is there to supply power and hold it down. Lifters require a power to weight ratio greater than one, which probably isn't possible with an on-board power supply. This MIT plane integrates the power supply and uses wing lift to reduce the required power, just as all planes do, and as the ionic propulsion planes did before (as others have linked to).
This is just the MIT press department embarrassing themselves again, or perhaps proving that sensationalism is a required part of science/funding these days.
Ground effect planes and to a lesser extent gliders are cheating and we can’t forget that.
But taking an ion propulsion system that previously only worked in vacuum and making it work at sea level is not nothing. I haven’t seen anything here to convince me it’s pure parlor trick. It’s part parlor trick for sure, but the sort that opens wallets.
How were they cheating? Lifters don't use ground effect at all. With a proper power supply, they have a power/weight ratio much greater than one. Does a helicopter or F22 Raptor cheat to fly?
> taking an ion propulsion system that previously only worked in vacuum
You misunderstand what this is. This ionizes air and accelerates it towards a surface with opposite charge. This design will not work in a vacuum, since it requires atmosphere [1] as a propellant. I built one of these thrusters when I was a kid using an old TV power supply. It takes some wire, aluminum foil, tens of thousands of volts, and a stomach for inefficiency (for example, the mentioned plane has a thrust of 6.25N/kW, the motor/prop on a drone is nearly 10x that). The only difference between a lifter and this is the direction of thrust, and the use of wings to supply lift, which all aircraft with a power to weight ratio less than 1.0 necessarily do. The accomplishment, and it is impressive, is the engineering to make it all light/efficient, given the terrible efficiency of these types of motors, while using the advancements in the energy density of batteries to allow it to be integrated.
> I haven’t seen anything here to convince me it’s pure parlor trick
I don't understand this. I don't think anyone is saying it's a parlor trick. It's impressive engineering. I just don't think it's accurate to say it's the first [2]. 20 years ago, there were sites with people attaching these to gliders (although, I can't find them anymore).
> This is just the MIT press department embarrassing themselves again.
Is the MIT press department capable of being embarrassed? Maybe they embarrass MIT, or at least people associated with MIT, but I don't think they embarrass themselves or they'd have changed their behavior.
I've been birding over the pandemic and learning about how they fly. Watching them, it starts to become clear just how skilled and efficient they are.
This tech demo is amazing, but my mind immediately compares it to things like the ruby-throated hummingbird migration, in which a 5 gram bird[0] flies 500+ MILES nonstop over open water, on maybe 2 grams of fat storage.
Then they feed by hovering so accurately that they can reliably thread a 1/8" beak into a moving 1/4" target.
They can do this directly into 20 mph headwinds [0]. Also in rainstorms where they are constantly getting pelted with their bodyweight in wet missiles every few seconds.
They can also fly 30mph in level flight, which in body lengths / second is ~4x times faster than an SR-71.
The other one that amazes me is the Petrel family, that digest fish and process oil from them and store it in their foregut. This allows them to fly long distances - like, Falkland Islands to Svalbard kind of distances - without really stopping.
The thing that gets me about it is they brew this fish oil into something with the energy density of *diesel* that they can then digest, and I have this mental picture of some kind of Endura-DI Shearwater flapping, clattering and smoking, all the way across the Atlantic in search of its breeding grounds...
There is a crappy pdf of this floating around that I read before buying this. Deffo worth it but for those who want to try before you buy it’s worth ‘binging’ it.
While hummingbirds are amazing, I think we will have to model out systems more closely to birds of prey. Most birds can’t carry much extra weight, until you get to raptors and some sea birds.
We would be after something that can carry a payload such as a salmon, a coconut, or a human.
> Then they feed by hovering so accurately that they can reliably thread a 1/8" beak into a moving 1/4" target.
They can do this directly into 20 mph headwinds [0]. Also in rainstorms where they are constantly getting pelted with their bodyweight in wet missiles every few seconds.
What I find amazing is that chickens appear to possess a sort of natural optical stabilizer - which will keep their heads still even when the rest of their body is moved. [1]
If this is a regular feature of bird anatomy, it would explain how a lot of their precision during flight is archived.
At least this made it click for me how an eagle is likely able to keep track of some tiny rodent hundreds of meters below it while hovering in mid-air and bracing against wind, turbulences, etc.
I suspect we have the same mechanism, but only applied to the eyeballs, not the whole head.
> The use of EHD propulsion for lift was studied by American aircraft designer Major Alexander Prokofieff de Seversky in the 1950s and 1960s. He filed a patent for an "ionocraft" in 1959. He built and flew a model VTOL ionocraft capable of sideways manoeuvring by varying the voltages applied in different areas, although the heavy power supply remained external.
Wow. Seversky was the guy advocating for long-range air power in WWII. He wrote Victory Through Air Power, which inspired Disney to finance an animated film on the subject out of his own pocket. Seversky appears in person in the film to introduce some concepts. The film is just amazing. It was available as part of a Disney DVD compilation quite a few years ago (Disney in the Trenches? [edit to correct title of box set: it was "Walt Disney Treasures - On the Front Lines"]). The standalone film is on archive.org:
Filmmaker Walt Disney read the book, and felt that its message was so important that he would personally finance a partly-animated short, also called Victory Through Air Power, which was released in July 1943.[3] Disney's purpose for creating the film was to promote Seversky's theories to government officials and the public. After seeing the film, Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt decided that Seversky knew what he was talking about, changing the course of the war.
This is exactly right, when I was in grad school we also explored new ionization designs to reduce the voltage requirements to achieve this. In our explorations, biggest problems were weight and voltage issues.
Very cool to see though, you can make this at home with a very basic high voltage generator and a set of needles.
I like the video in the article quite a lot! The gentleman speaking in it is one of the scientists working on the project, and manages to convey an excitement and basic idea that the layman can kind of understand, as well as some fun history. Wish more articles could have this kind of interviews!
That looks pretty impressive, but I am quite skeptical of the fact that this craft uses ion propulsion for any significant proton of its thrust. A reddit user [1] suggests that it uses ducted fans which I am way more inclined to believe. The very high pitched noise is typical of a high velocity propeller blowing high velocity air. Which seems wildly incompatible with those large grids where one would expect relatively low velocity air with very little noise. There are also four very suspicious tubes running along the body of the craft.
Ok holy shit that is on another level, the original had barely enough thrust to sustain flight of that almost lighter than air glider, this lifts up fuckin vertically with no moving parts.
But I suspect the time it flies in the video is the time it takes to completely empty the batteries, as is the usual caveat.
Interesting to see the development over the past few years and how theory is comparing to practice. One of the theorized benefits from the MIT video was quieter drones. This article says the ionic propulsion demoed is about 85db which sounds like it’s just as loud as current drones.
Unlike turbine-powered planes, the aircraft does not depend on fossil fuels to fly. And unlike propeller-driven drones, the new design is completely silent.
I suspect that the design is silent due to its low power and that something with enough thrust to perform some useful task would be louder even if the noise is that of wind only.
It’s extremely loud, something I didn’t expect, and sounds very much like a high speed fan. Together with the black box it made me suspicious if we aren’t being deceived. Two comments under the article think the same.
These were popular decades ago, and were the focus of many an argument over the basis in theory of how they worked. Many did not understand that they depend on atmosphere to operate.
I seem to remember first hearing about these "lifters" in highschool, so that would have been late 1990s. But that recollection is based solely on remembering the dumb friend I had who thought it would be a good idea to try to make one, not knowing anything about high voltage electricity.
Luckily, we were also too distracted by video games to go dumpster diving for a CRT or microwave transformer.
Sounds cool, but the headline is pretty bait-y. First, the aircraft has no control surfaces, so it's limited to flying in a straight line. So the headline should read "MIT engineers fly first-ever plane with no moving parts in propulsion". And then, even that's not true, since ramjets[0] have been a thing for a long time.
Thank you! When I read the headline I wasn't even thinking of propulsion: gliders have no moving parts for propulsion, neither do solid rocket engines, so what? What I wanted to know was how on earth they made something to do the job of an aileron without moving to affect the airflow... And I was disappointed to find out that they didn't.
"No moving parts" is a dumb way to advertise this. It's a cool thing, an self-propelled ionic propulsion system, but the fact it has no moving parts isn't an especially interesting feature of it.
I’ve been curious about using high heat combustion plus RF to create denser plasmas (ionized air) plus pulsed magnets to push the air. It seems impossible for earthly flight, but maybe with lightweight super conductors.
I’ve also been curious about using very large-area weak ionizers for future zeppelins.
Plasma propulsion has been used for zeppelin flight at a small scale. Plasmas are also used for flow control on wings and propellers. There doesn’t seem to be much unclassified research in the area, though.
Nothing earthbound that I know of, but it sounds like you are describing something similar to the electric propulsion thrusters that PhaseFour makes: https://phasefour.io/rf-thruster/
25 years ago there was a site Kely Net or something similar, also I think there is JLN labs that is still alive, there was lot of over-unity things, BS and scams, but I distinctively remember few of the technologies back then that now popping up as mainstream wonder ...
Aluminium oxide engine, brown gas, mighty engine, ion lifter, metal latices fusion ... it is kind of odd how long we need to start exploring new tech.
Does this work because of the mass difference between electrons and protons?
If you separate an electron from an atom, charge is conserved, mass in conserved. Apply an electric field, then you shoot the ion one way and the electron the other. The heavy ion then acts like propellant. Mass still conserved, charge still conserved. At some point the electron is absorbed into some random ion elsewhere and the ion grabs an electron from elsewhere.
I tried to find a more precise answer but technically an ion-drive is an electric motor, so I'm guessing it's comparable. The thing is that based on the couple demos I watched the flight seems really erratic. It makes me wonder if the fuel supply is somewhat inconsistent i.e. air turbulence makes the actual theoretical energy efficiency moot.
I'm having trouble understanding why it would necessarily be comparable to a traditional electric motor in efficiency. Whether or not it's "technically" an electric motor, it's operating on completely different principles. The first things that come to mind are there are no moving parts to generate friction and heat, and it requires much higher voltage. Wouldn't those aspects alone swing the efficiency one way or the other?
It was a big guess for sure. To be clear, I don't know. I did find this in my search, which suggests it's not exponential[0], so it seems you're correct. There's a drop-off at higher exhaust speeds, but it's unclear to me why that is.
Kinetic energy of the particles (which has to ultimately come out of the battery) is proportional to mv^2. Momentum of the particles (which is ultimately equal and opposite to thrust) is proportional to mv.
the video is really not convincing lol, it doesn't look like it's doing much more than gliding from the initial launch force, which is due to an external (moving) force.
I'm not buying that, that whine sounds just like a ducted fan and there is a giant hole in the support base just where the ducted fan needs to blow the air to avoid having that air pushed sideways, if the lift was generated by the ionized air it would be nearly silent.
My understanding is that the ionized air is used in tandem with electric field to accelerate plain air (non-ionized) by collision/friction. In other words, the ionized air is being used as a gaseous propeller.
I thought about doing this when I was playing with lifters a couple decades ago. The idea was that you could ionize the boundary layer, to make it somewhat "self repulsive", to thin it, to try to reduce the skin friction drag [1].
I remember doing some napkin math, and the added weight/power would be a net loss.
Accelerating the ‘plain air’ isn’t really necessary to the propulsion. Once you’ve accelerated the ions you’ve already accomplished a momentum transfer - if those ions then go and share that momentum with some non ionized air molecules that’s their own business.
I guess maybe the non ionized air acts to keep the ions around between the two charged grids for longer, which means that for each ion you create you can maybe exploit its attractive/repulsive force for longer?
seems like no video of taking off by itself, they seem to have some catapult/string to take off, so if it can't take off it's not really a plane, just glider
It operates by using a high voltage to strip electrons from nitrogen atoms, then the opposite current to attract those ions to the front surface of a wing. The movement of the ions causes the air to move, which generates lift over the wing.
So no, there's no moving parts involved in generating the lift.
I've been assuming it means "general poster" (in contrast to OP which means "original poster"). Could also be "grandparent" (in the context of the comment hierarchy of "parent"). In any case, regardless of the specific abbreviation intended, the meaning is pretty clear from context.
GP (noun): the author of a previous comment which is the topic of the current comment. "the GP wasn't sure about the terminology until IIAOPSW came in and cleared it up."
"This is not the first flight of an ion-drive aircraft. Seversky was patenting and flying ionocraft in the 1960s [2], hobbyists have been building them for decades under the name "lifter", and a self-contained device that carries its own power supply was developed by Ethan Krauss in 2006.
MIT's device may be the first ionocraft to use wings for lift, however. The previous devices behaved more like helicopters than airplanes, and did not need wings to stay aloft."
[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0707-9
[1] https://pubpeer.com/publications/020C19C112F2605CEC4B34CA320...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GijJmIz1G7U