Ionocraft

An Experiment in Alternative Aerospace Engines

The Ionocraft was the first engineering project I ever did, completed as a project for a class in high school. For those who are unfamiliar, an Ionocraft is a type of aircraft which generate lift through ionization of air molecules. When wire and foil are highly polarized, the air molecules will become ionized. This ionization will happen only at the polarized surfaces, and the ionized particles will move towards the oppositely polarized surface, generating lift.

While the operating principles of the Ionocraft were simple enough to understand, building a working device proved much more difficult. My first challenge was figuring out how to achieve the polarization necessary. In order to properly ionize the air, 15 KV were required, a voltage that cannot be safely generated readily. There were industrial strength electrical transformers, they were far too expensive for use in this project. In light of this I decided to construct my own transformer. I did some research into how to design a voltage ladder, eventually designing and assembling one that fit my purposes.

With a suitably powerful transformer it was now time to build the ionocraft. This proved harder than anticipated as we overestimated the amount of lift the craft could produce. Initially we built the craft out of foil, bare wire, and pine. Unfortunately the pine proved too dense for our purposes and our initial craft was unable to lift itself off the ground. The craft was then rebuilt with lighter weight balsa wood, shaving off some weight. With the craft now lighter it was able to ascend a short distance into the air before arcing, loosing its lift, and crashing. The arcing was a major setback, as not only did it prevent the air from properly ionizing it was a mystery as to what was causing it. Through experimentation it was eventually determined that jagged edges in the foil was responsible for the arcing. Thus a third craft was made, this time with greater care put into ensuring all the polarized surfaces were properly smoothed. The final craft was a great success, rising into the air as far as the power wires would allow it

This project was done in a two person group, with me handling most of the calculations and assembly, and my partner handling most electrical components. Though we divided the work into areas of our relative expertise we still worked very closely together on each part, with the most knowledgeable person simply acting as the leader for that component. As such there was not really a leader in the group, we yielded control based on who was more knowledgeable. Overall the project was a success, the ionocraft functioned properly and we received a good grade.