The lifter tests: ARL, NASA and Tajmar
In 2003–04 the US Army Research Laboratory, a NASA contractor and the Austrian physicist Martin Tajmar tested 'lifters', the asymmetric capacitors that hover on Brown's effect.
2003 CE · 39.03, -76.96 · status: explained
The account
Bahder and Fazi (ARL-TR-3005, 2003) measured the force and found that a simple model of ionic wind looked too small, calling for vacuum tests rather than endorsing any gravity effect. The NASA Glenn contractor report (Canning, Melcher and Winet, 2004) found that 'all of the measured data was consistent with' ions colliding with air molecules. Tajmar (AIAA Journal, 2004) found no thrust once corona wind was excluded or in vacuum, and called the effect a misinterpretation of corona wind. A 2020 review of air-breathing electric thrusters (Zheng and colleagues, International Journal of Aerospace Engineering) treats lifter-type electrohydrodynamic thrust as ion wind made by corona discharge. It summarises the NASA tests as finding thrust equal to the ion wind and corona propulsion 'impractical'. It also notes that efficiency is usually below 1% at higher air pressure, which rules EHD out as a main propulsion device (p.14).
Connections in the atlas
- Thomas Townsend Brown
- The Coolidge tube that seemed to change weight
- The 'gravitator' patent and the Biefeld–Brown effect
- Naval Research Laboratory and the S-48 gravity expedition
- Project Winterhaven
- Tests in Paris for SNCASO
- The 'gravitics' boom and the Electrogravitics Systems report
- Brown founds NICAP
- The Bahnson laboratory (Whitehall-Rand)
- The electrokinetic patents
- Rock electricity on Catalina Island
- MIT's ion-wind aeroplane