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I recently saw on the show Mythbusters on their "anti-gravity episode" that they used a technology called a "lifter" which was able to float in the air by means of an ionic wind(NOT Antigravity). Also I recently heard about a solid state fan that uses the same ion wind technology, and which can also outperform regular fans in weight and power. So theoretically if you were able to somehow get enough lifting energy from ion wind then you could make either a toy car that floated around on ion wind, or you could make a full sized hover board. But in fact if enough power was possible someday you may even have a rocket pack version, to get from place to place in the future. The draw backs of this technology are:(1)It may not have enough power to lift a person in a compact device.(2)It uses very high voltages(20,000V's). (3)It has a bi-product of Ozone gas from the corona discharge used to make the ion wind. Also you'd need to have DC to DC step up voltage circuit that some technical people might know, which is also in a portable unit along with the battery. But also stabilizing the platform has to be worked out, in some kind of self stabilizing arrangement of electro-aerodynamic pumping.
artZ, Sep 12 2008
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You seem to have already recognized the main problems. The biggest problem is #1. Right now, the best ion lifters are not even powerful enough to lift the weight of their own power supply, much less a passenger. To lift a human using current state-of-the-art lifters, the lifter would have to be larger than a parachute. Of course, the high voltage and ozone are serious problems too. Ion lifters are very efficient, but that's only because thre is very little electrical current flow.
The best transportation use I've seen suggested for ionic lifters/thrusters is to propel airships. In that case, the gas (helium) would provide the lift and the ion thruster would just propel it forward. The skin of the craft would act as the "foil" of the ion thruster.
Though I think the ion-wind rocket-pack or hoverboard are really optimistic, I think you don't give enough credit to boarders--snowboards are unstable in two dimensions and people seem to do alright on them. I don't think the instability would really be an impediment.
BTW, why would an ion-fan hoverboard be better than a propeller-fan hoverboard? It's simply a regular hovercraft, no matter which type of fan. I believe that there hasn't been a hovercraft as small as a skateboard, but I don't see why using bad fans (ion) would be advantageous over using good fans (propellers). (??)
On the rocket-pack ion-blast, again there is a propeller 'rocket' packs already, one showed at OshKosh this summer. Fact is, there really isn't any use for a rocket pack. I don't think I'd take one to work even if I could.