hoola

It has occured to me that there could be some advantage to grinding off the normal electrical contact surfaces from the faces of the piezos, and moving them to the inner and outer ring surfaces, which are normally electrical insulators. This would allow a central rod attachment for grounding the stack, and move the drive signals to each exterior ring surface. The advantages would be no intervening poly insulators or contact materials within the stack, enhancing shock transfer between elements. The physical distances between contacts would be doubled from approx 5mm to 10mm, perhaps offering a higher breakdown voltage, and an overall simplified assembly and shorter stack length. The central ring contact could be the full width of the body, as all are contacted electrically anyway, but the outside rings would need some gaps between them, so would necessarily be somewhat narrower, to prevent mixing of drive voltages between the edge contacts. The voltage leakage between the edge contacts would be an issue to deal with, and the main problem which I see with this idea.

Isn't this a rehash of the pebble bed idea of a few years ago....they were grape sized as I recall, with similar coating of graphite or some other stabilizing element. Why so tiny? That seems to be a danger in itself, so small it would be hard to keep track of each particle's state of depletion and then to manipulate during refuelings

thanks for the good input hu??....yes, I have pretty much determined that the thrust measured so far is from the audio standing waves causing a column of air pressure below the stack, as I re oriented the stack to be well above the platform and the thrust disappears, but with some odd aspects that need to be resolved later, but for now, I presume some actual thrust is there but near the same level with woodwards team, down in the micronewtons. I have had to air cool the output stages running 1KV into the supply to the output transistors. Pushing the piezos too hard causes excessive noise in the system, overheats the machine, making all relevant issues more difficult. My plan now is to lower the voltage back down to 300V. The machine runsr cool at that level, and can easily deliver a stable signal of my thrust candidate. i will next build a five parallel stage linear to be driven by the equipment with this lowered supply voltage. This will allow the linear to do the heavy lifting to drive a second stack of identical piezos which will now be the proposed thrust element in the system, the existing stack to be used as five separate signal sources. I have looked up transistors that can handle high voltages and currents and have found nothing so far, so will proceed with 6JE6 horizontal output tubes which can handle plate voltages up to 5KV. The 6BK4 was used as a HV reg in early color tvs, and operated as a triode with a normal plate voltage of 25 KV, so if the "piezos diriving piezos" concept proves workable, and no thrust seen in 6JE6 drive mode, higher voltages will be tried with 6BK4s until the breakdown voltage of piezos is reached.

If a ship is near relatiivistic speed, it can measure Unruh radiation at the ship's location, and not to a stationary observer watching it going by, correct? The same with Hawking radiation.....it could be measured at or near the event horizon, but not at a distance? If so, it that because the info in either case is red shifted away ?

As both seem to be the collision of matter into a region that normally is undisturbed, unless by a abnormal situation in where the VP pair's structure, which is determined from the first instant, is a mirror of what should be it's perfect antiparticle. By the time the energy waveform hits the second instant, matter normally not present is near enough to have quantum effects show up. This is the distortion factor in common.

What functional relation is there, if any, to Unruh radiation emitted under high velocities by an accelerated spaceship, and of stationary thrusters, either the Woodward device, which accelerates a phononic shock wave, or the Shawyer device which accelerates microwave standing waves in a sealed cavity? Here I am presuming that the NASA work showing the Shawyer device to work as legitimate, hence my interest in this area.

My intuition of the functioning principle of the woodward thruster is the intrusion of mass into a region that has begun the appearance of virtual particle pairs. This remaining component of the duty cycle of the particle pairs are necessarily changed, and by this, a partial violation of the Pauli exclusion principle causes certain novel conditions. Since the pairs need symmetry in their outcome, that is denied, and the final annialation behaves differently, or is distorted. This releases energy to the degree of the percentage of violation of the Pauli exclusion principle.

a good enough effort to pick the water up and pour it out without affecting velocity would make that consideration negligible...just as similar issues of a light breeze or a changing tide would affect any outcome. .Mass variations seem enough to overcome trivial issues such as these. I will try this. I will call my friend Steve and setup a test at the local resevoir.

the person with the bucket has the (variable) momentum, and has more going back then going forward since the bucket is emptied at the back.

sorry for any misunderstanding...the claim is for propellantless propulsion, not reactionless, and with the added benefit of no physical exhaust coming out. Why would being in a vacuum on earth , or in microgravity in space prevent it to function, plus why considerations of GWs in this situation?

@ mordred....let me give you the explanation offered by the SSI group of how they say their device functions. A person at the front of a boat with an empty bucket fills the bucket with water from the lake and then walks to the back. The boat advances forward 3 feet as a result. At that point they dump the water and walk back to the front with the empty bucket. This initially stops the boat and then makes it go back slightly less than three feet. There is more mass going back than forward, and the boat goes forward in overall movement. If this cycle is repeated thousands of time per second by an electically driven mechanical device, you have continuous movement in space, or thrust in the lab, as they are claiming in their piezoelectric assy.. If you have heard this story before or something similar and know it's failings, please advise...thanks

at this point I agree with about anyone who says it won't develop any thrust in space. It is almost certainly getting the small thrust I am seeing from the acoustic oscillation effects that I have described. Having to wear hearing protection on some high frequency tests was the tip off that I had an acoutic standing wave issue I hadn't yet considered and must test for. As the noise increased, the scale reading went up, but that was certainly just the sound waves pushing the stack up or down, depending on which way the stack was driven.....I will test in helium first. If I still get the10 milligram weight changes I have been getting, then I will make a partial vaccuum followed by a hard vaccuum if warranted.....that should settle the issue. I have emailed SSI.org who are the umbrella organization that is supporting the woodward thruster efforts, and have asked them if they are doing their testing in a vaccuum. The shawyer engine was criticized as not developing true thrust under ambient air, so was loaned to NASA who tested it in a vaccuum and found it did develop thrust....of course it works on microwaves, and may not apply to the piezo case...... I hope to hear from SSI this month on the vaccuum question...Thanks for your input.

It has occured to me that the thrust is real, but caused by an acoustic standing wave created above or below the stack depending on which way the stack is driven. I will need to get a vaccuum chamber and test within that to falsify my results.

yes, strange, but the gravity signal would get there at the speed of light, along with other emf, neutrons, gamma waves, etc...if they could be divided out just before vaporization...lol.... .for what it's worth, in my last test before moving everything to the warehouse, I am getting 10mg of weight increase with a 300v supply, a clock freq of 2.5mhz, and a scan freq of 300hz. The tone coming out of the stack now is so loud I have to use ear protection. I am afraid to turn up the supply any more for fear of cracking the piezos. I have had a small chunk fall out of one the ceramic rings, and had to replace it, but that may have been a manufacturing defect...The NFB circuits are affecting the scan once more in this new, higher frequency. .....@ swansont....what if 2 adjacent nukes went off at the ligo, would that satisfy the non-symmetry aspect? thanks

@ swansont...I don't think either team has directly said that, but I do raise the question of how thrust, if they (or anyone) are indeed producing it, is related to GWs at the fundamental levels. Is propellantless thrust synthetic gravity and closely related, or psuedo gravity, and not? @ strange...I was thinking about how an instantaneous local event, not how a remote merger or other natural phenomena, might be detected. With a rapid deceleration of a massive object directly in front of a proposed sensor, could proximity allow detection? Would the 58 megaton thermonuclear explosion set off by the soviet union have created GWs at any theoretically detectable level , if it happened proximate to ligo?

Yes, you are almost certainly correct. When I get my upgraded setup going, the thrust will probably disspear, or be so far down in the noise as to be useless. I suspect interactions are happening between the stack and the two generators and aux power supply that are inadequately shielded from the scale itself. A millinewton thruster would have been done well before now if it were possible get anything more than the micronewtons that the Shawyer and Woodward are claiming.

A possible way around interference from the sound created in a violent test is that GWs travel at the speed of light and the acoustic signature will arrive later,. By using a gated scope input that is triggered off just after an estimated GW signal arrival time, or directly muted with an impact sensor with a small delay to allow any ringing to complete post impact.

A pertubation from a mundane acceleration is tiny, but if it happens proximate to a proposed reciever, could the inverse square law offer a local GW amplitude capable of detection? I would think it would require an acoustic barrier with some form of sound cancellation, or ideally be done in a vaccuum. Perhaps the stack could be placed in a vaccuum chamber, and any testing could not acoustically affect any readings.. Is deceleration equivalent to an accelration in creating GWs? thanks

If one were to have an inertial thruster, would that also constitute a gravitational wave transmitter of sorts? Even though it may function on simple conscepts on the macro scale, aren't all gravitaional effects based upon the same fundamental laws near or at the plank scale, and if the thruster causes a synthetic gravitational vectorized force, does that remove it from such considerations, and onto something else? How would a thruster behave if impinged upon by a gravity wave crossing it's thrust vector at various angles? Could GW signals be detected by causing distortions within a thruster set at a fixed pattern and an incoming wave might distort the scope trace? Would dropping a bowling ball from a height onto a thick concrete pad cause GWs to be created? What simple way would create the largest amplitude of GWs that would be easily attained?

A website offers a milligram to micronewton conversion table of 50mg= 490.3325 micronewtons. If I am generating 10 mg of force, that should translate into nearly 100 micronewtons. The lever itself is a possible issue in determining what force is actually pesent. The scale is on the long end , 7 1/4" from the pivot, and the center of the stack is 1 1/2" on the other side of the pivot. The stack has 7 piezos each weighing 33.7 grams for a total of 235.9 grams. There are two heavy steel washers at the ends, of 33 grams for both. The central nylon bolt, nut and two heavy poly washers weigh 20 grams. There are six thin poly washers, each weighing 1.8 grams. This comes to a total of 294.9 grams. I am not sure if uneven lever lengths from the pivot point, or stack weight have anything to do with measuring expressed forces. The scale is slightly overbalanced with approx 6 milligrams of weight on the scale side as a tare force.

Today I have found that the trigger function of the wavetek 182A can function as a pulse control, and does so better than the new circuit I just added to do so. So now, that system is turned off, as well as the nfb circuits, both of which seem uneeded at this point. The nfb circut does make some minor changes, but there seems to be some natural phase cancellation of the unwanted reflected pulse going on at specific frequencies of clock freq and trigger speed may make those circuts unecessary for now. I have found that a 110khz clock freq along with a 70hz pulse rate from a standard audio oscillator set to square wave triggering the wavetek is a sweet spot that gives a 10mg weight change to the scale, and when the drive is removed, the weight change dissapears, indicating a potential thrust that is now well above the noise level of the scale and limitations within the system. A possible error may be happening if RFI is affecting the scale directly from the stack which is quite noisey, but it is about 10" away from the stack at the opposite end of the lever. My new setup in the warehouse has two small rooms adjacent to each other, and the driver unit, generatoris, and all attendant power supplies will be in one room and will feed drive to the stack and scale in the other room through a small opening, which will have RFI shielding on the wall surfaces. A camera will view the scale, so the stack room will be the only thing in it. I will install shielding on the scale itself to try to minimize any errors there.

@ macswell, the free space I refer to is outer space, in microgravity. I am attempting to make a Woodward thruster to deliver to a sufficient thrust for satellite station keeping with a purely electrical input and no exhaust. Both Shawyer and Woodward are claiming micronewtons and some serious individuals have verified the results. I am now getting weight gains in the order of up to 10mg when properly stimulated on my scale, which translates to a weight loss of the piezo stack as I have a lever system that the stack is unbalancing to the milligram range on the scale, at the other end of the lever. I am wondering if it would offer a thrust in free space? @ swansont, I thought ion thrusters were the prefered method for satellite station keeping. Are there some that would work in space?

If an object can be made lighter by introduction of an purely electrical stimulus, does this signify that a thrust has been created within this object, or is there some other mechanism that can explain weight changes in a gravitational field, but not cause thrust in free space, if one were to rule out measurement errors?

thanks for the link swansont

With a typical comm satelite, what amount of thruster force is required to keep it in proper position? Thanks