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Rail gun powered boat | |||||||||||||||||
What if you had a rail gun put on the bottom of a boat that instead of propelling a conductive bullet it propels the conductive salt water. The higher the amperage the better with this form of motor. The higher the amperage, the higher the force of propulsion. This means you could scale it up with bigger power sources. It could be used on a sail boat for close proximity to shoreline. It doesn't fail like the normal rail gun because you're not using high bursts of energy and also it's self cooling because it's underwater. It is solid state for no maintenance. It could be used on flat bottom boats. In a far out notion you might put it on a hydrofoil if it had enough power and hydrofoils are the fastest boats around. The power source for it could be a gasoline powered electric generator, or wind turbines on the boat, or solar panels that build up energy into capacitors while sailing. But in the end we may need a new energy source someday for it to be possible. It's been done before just look under "lorentz force" on youtube. And I know some scientists have done it but I don't know what the projects were called.
artZ, Jun 25 2009
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I had the impression that a railgun worked on magnetic material to, in effect, use the same principle as an electric motor unwound into a straight line. Although salt water conducts electricity I am puzzled that it is implied that it is also magnetic.
What a great idea. Too bad that it really hasn't come to fruition yet. I think what you've described is referred to as "caterpillar drive" in the book/movie "Hunt for Red October".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetohydrodynamic_drive
Sand, railguns do not use the same principle as a linear electric motor. They don't need magnetic projectiles. Water will indeed work with this principle.
I looked up the railgun principle and saw that I confused it with the coilgun. Then if the principle is valid I wonder if it could be used with ionized air to create an electric fan with no moving parts. A small source capsule of shielded radioactive material could ionize air to permit it to be accelerated on the railgun principle and perhaps the system could be designed like a cyclotron for circular multiple acceleration until a useful air blast could be achieved. If the principle is sound it might even be used as a compact jet engine for miniature flying robot surveying machines.
this technology is commonly used in standing air purifiers, by ionizing the air with one charged grid, then driving it toward an oppositely charged grid, and an MIT project in the 90's tried exactly what you described on an rc submarine, but found it extremely inefficient, bulky, and complex. the only good thing about it was that it is silent.
This invention uses the "lorentz force"(wiki) and the "right hand rule". which is a magnetic property. This invention doesn't use "ion wind"(wiki) technology which is a completely different technology. And it wouldn't be complex because all that would be needed is batteries or capacitors and metal strips attached to the boat and maybe a potentiometer(variable resistor) as the throttle. And in a typical rail gun you don't even need any magnets to make it work.