Plasma Jet Engine Suit
Have you ever wanted a rocket pack to soar amongst the sky? Now you can … on Mars… Gravity is less, atmospheric density is less, and the vistas are breathtaking. So come to Mars...
Buck Rogers aside, Mars is an interesting environment for out-of-this-world mobility options for an explorer. This challenge asks for the definition of a conceptual mobility solution to allow an astronaut to easily and rapidly explore Mars including overcoming obstacles such as cliffs, ravines and other difficult terrain. The solution should be person-portable and any means or source of propulsion be locally produced.
This challenge can be answered by:
- producing an app to simulate your adventures in building your jet pack and flying around Mars;
- produce an app that provides the local gravity, atmospheric conditions (density, weather, anything-else-of-interest) to help decide what is needed for your jet pack design;
- perform a feasibility/conceptual study of an actual jet pack design that could use potential Mars fuel sources; or Design and Demonstrate a model scale jet pack using hardware.
We would like to introduce to you to a jet backpack, where ionplasma engineshould be used. Within the ion plasma engine ionized plasma is used as impulse transmitting material. Here low temperature plasma is used, it is the plasma with temperature of lower than 1 million K. NASA is interested in the rocket engines that are already on the level of the pilot study. In the engine proposed by us water will be used as base material, which is available in the space in large quantities. In this engine, the water will pass through the two or three of its aggregate states, if the water is in solid form. In the engine combustion chamber, for transfering water vapor into ionized plasma state a powerful electric field should be used, where for transfering 1 mol (or 18 grams) of water vapor into ionized plasma ≈1476 KJoul energy will be utilized. The vapor penetrates into the electrical field under pressure in the form of a special stream for enabling the electric arc directly in the vapor stream center by means of splitting the water molecules in the vapor into components (H, OH, H2, O, O2, (H2O gaseous)). It is known that during this process a large volume of energy is extracted, where the temperature in the arc core can be 8000 - 50 000 K.
During electric arc the generated ions acquire large volume of energy. Hitting the water molecules in the adjacent vapor, the ions transfer energy to them. Thus, the ions raise the vapor temperature of the combustion chamber up to 4500OC. Thermal split temperature of water molecule begins with 2200OC. In this temperature thesplitting makes 3%, and when the water vapor temperatures reaches 3000OC, it makes up over 50%. And when water vapor temperature reaches 5000OC, it is considered that all the material is broken down into elementaryelements.In the plasmacombustion chamber the gas, while expandeding, causes great pressure. Ions come out of the combustion chamber pipe at the speed of 4462 m/s. Theoretically, the opposite reaction will occur due to energy loss by the plasma in the engine jet, hydrogen and oxygen conversion into water, which will extract another portion of 120-140 KJoul/g energy. And most importantly, that this process will be carried out with explosive speed, and the rest will come out in the form of photons.
Conclusion. In the end, we use hydrogen-oxygen rocket engine, where we know that the speed of the exhaust gases can reach up to 4462 m/s. It is the most effective today. Since our engine temperature does not exceed the level of 4500OC, we refrain from the use of heavy and expensive electro-magnets and heavy and expensive tanks for keeping liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. In its turn, this excludes the risk of explosion.
Self made and idea is mine :)
