Every curious engineer has wondered how to use the principles developed in the Dyson “Air Multiplyer” fan for propulsion.  There may be a way to do this.

Take a gander at this diagram of fluid flow rate through and around the Dyson fan.  The air jets that slide along the inner surface of the airfoil ring flow at a rate of 50mph as reference.

You can see that the film of high-speed air is introduced on the surface of the ring early on, very close to the forward plane of the fan.  You can also see the green zone emanating outward perpendicular to the 50 mph flow stream.  This effect is what must be responsible for recruiting air from in front of the ring by creating a low pressure region.  This is classic Bernoulli effect stuff.

It is interesting to note that all of the recruited air seems to merge with the high-speed flow and exits the ring as a conical flow with an area of ‘dead space’ in the center of the cone.

Now, in order to begin thinking about creating an engine out of this design we need to evaluate the power consumption issue.  In the case of the Dyson fan almost no thrust is generated but despite that, a very powerful motor and robust inductor is required to form adequate pressure.  It seems implausible that even a large turbine would be able to induce high enough flow rates while being light enough to leave the ground.  In addition, such a scaled-up version of the Dyson fan would be very complex and costly.

This line of thinking leads to the idea of getting rid of the impeller and replacing it with a rocket system.  This new concept would reduce the complexity and cost of the system while permitting the highest possible nozzle velocities and maximum thrust.

One particular type of rocket nozzle suggests that a rocket-powered air multiplying ‘jet engine’ is actually possible.  This nozzle is called an AeroSpike engine.  The geometry of an AeroSpike rocket engine is the inverse of a traditional bell-shaped nozzle that we are all familiar with.  The principle of operation for AeroSpike engines is that the pressure of the atmosphere forces the flow being ejected along the surface of the spike and provides uniform thrust in this way.  AeroSpikes were developed because they are less influenced by air pressure and have been considered as thrusters on the next space shuttle.

Here are some pictures of AreoSpike engines:

If it is possible to combine the AeroSpike operating principles with those of the Dyson fan the resulting technology would be a very elegant propulsion system with few moving parts and better efficiency over conventional rockets.  Further analysis is required to divine weather the flow in such an engine would remain laminar or if it would become a jumbled turbulent mess.  It is also not clear at this point what the fuel efficiency of such a system would be and if it would be applicable to UAVs or (more importantly) to general aviation propulsion.

One of the unintended consiquences of these two wars has been the development and field testing of a very new type of weapons system, unmaned arial vehicles (UAV).  These UAVs have been used both for survailance and for combat missions and have undergon substantial evolutionary changes throughout the roughly 8 years that they have been in use.  Why don’t we put this technology to good use?

The UAV infrastructure and technology platforms constitute a tramendous opportunity to give rise to a new era of air transport.  The UAV infrastructure can be used to build a safe, low-risk network of small airports servicing small (4 place) aircraft on direct routs.  This dream could be brought quickly into reality with one simple policy.

Here it is:

50% of all UAVs sourced for the Department of Defense must be built on a general aviation airframe and the avionics and communication systems must be designed around the passenger configuration.

DARPA should be involved in creating a contest in partnership with universities and general aviation companies in order to develop airframes that match the above specification while striving for new distance, speed and fuel efficiency benchmarks.

In Visual Terms:

+ PLUS +

+ PLUS +

= EQUALS =

AWESOME!

Update:

I just calculated the fuel econemy of the Swift’Light PAS and the result was very surprising.  I calculated an average of nearly 150 miles per gallon.  I used the fact that the tank holds 8 liters (2.1 gal) , has a flight speed of ~100kph (62mph) and has a flight duration of 5 hrs per tank.  Thats (62m/h*5h)/2.1gal=148m/gal.  Boom, that’s half again the goal for the automotive X prize of 100mpg but in the sky!  The only caveat is that the SWIFT glider frame has a Vne of 120km/h or nearly 70mph.

There is a more streamlned version of the powered SwiftLight with a longer cabin and retractable landing gear that probably has an even lower fuel consumption than the model for sale.

Is it possible to create an airframe that is competitive with the automobile?  Clearly you don’t need to break any physical laws to do it.  The question really is how much money and time will it take to build.  A slice of the D.O.D. budget would sure help!

Some Swift’Light PAS pictures:

After seeing Burt Rutan on Big Think the concept of creating a network of personal ‘airtaxis’ to fill the inter-city transit needs of the country feels like a really big idea indeed.  The idea of small aircraft with very good fuel economy and comparable true costs of operating a car is so compelling because it means much shorter transit times, a trillion dollar cost avoidance in interstate highway repairs and the volume production required to make small airframes very affordable for a number of applications.

Light air for inter-city transit is also a model that the US is uniquely positioned to create because of our mature air traffic control system, low corruption, good safety regulations and top research institutions for avionics.  As a result of building this system the US will have created technology that can help Africa, South America, Inda and even China avoid the costs associated with building a robust interstate highway OR high speed rail.  For the environmentalist/ urbanist this new approach to transit provides a more compelling experience than the car thus providing the social and economic pressure needed to quickly urbanize the US and begin the process of remediation the suburbs. 

Getting the conversation started with Scaled Composites:

Mr. Rutan & Team,

I had an idea that I would like to contribute to the very inspired idea of transitioning to a taxi model instead of the present bigger is better business model of air travel.  I would like to contribute some ideas if I can.

Among the problems that require breakthroughs, perhaps one of the most challenging is finding enough qualified pilots.  One solution to this that the US is uniquely prepared to develop is to use “virtual pilots” the way that UAVs are piloted.  In this way, virtual pilots could work from locals across the country providing logistical support and taking control of the aircraft virtually.  This model also improves the economics of flight by freeing space in the cockpit.

One interesting consequence of virtual pilots is that pilot expertise can be teared such that more experienced pilots take control only in dangerous weather or during takeoff and landing while less skilled pilots provide service at other times.  Hospitals use this model.  Surely hospitals are as risky as aviation is.

I am presently working as a technology broker and I would love to assist in the development of the above concept.  Please let me know if you would be interested in a more detailed proposal.

Ray Kurzwiel is very convincing in his argument that technology evolution is best understood to be the extention of biological evolution.  Put another way, all of biological evolution is part of a continuous process of steady growth and development for over 3 billion years on planet earth.  Mathematitions would rightly suggest that this process basically is the evaluation of a ‘solution space’ that contains all possible servival technologies through a simple algorythmic process.  This view is bulstered by the very compelling theory that our universe is but one instance within a larger space of all possible universes governed by laws of computation (Steven Wolfram).  The fact that life is based on a type of computer code called DNA (or RNA) is further evidence that Ray Kurswile is amlost certianly correct in viewing the 3 billion year history of evolution as one continuous thing.  A force of nature almost as essential as the law of gravitation.  This is the first thing that we must accept about the nature of modern technology and as such we can use biology as a guide.

Evolution is selection not creation.  The process of creativity is mutation and sex/ mixing.

Do ideas have sex?  There is clearly an exchange of ideas and perhaps that exchange was once sexual.  Blending is surely a core element to how technology can evolve very rapidly and many great ideas are developed at the intersection of one domain with another.  Perhaps that is the “sexual process” of technology.  When a material developed in the space program is merged with the design technology of rescue blankets, for instance.  The process of taking one “core discovery” or breakthrough technology and trying it out in other domains is often the combination of two species of technology.  Like a cross breeding of plants.  It is interesting that even in biology “species sex” occurs via genetic engineering.  Is trade really a proper analogy to sexual blending and re-production of biological species or does it rhyme better with a biological innovation like flagella or being a virus.  I think that trade is much more analogs and important to technology as a viral mechanism.  Perhaps ideas have sex within the confines of our minds deep in the subconscious where inventing happens.  A deep understanding of cognition is required before really understanding this.  …On the other hand, perhaps trade is closer to multi-cellularity in humans  but on the scale of society.  Multicellularity allows greater complexity because of economies of scale and resource sharing.  The same principle of “opportunity costs” is exhibited but the benefits of trade are between cells.

4 Genius is from Love (Malcom Gladwell)

Malcom argues in his new book that genius in an art requires the love for a thing at an early age in order to develop.  Love is not enough to become the very best in the world and it is true that innate skill, resources and luck are involved but love is the key requirement.  This idea is interesting in it’s own right but it resonates with something that Burt Rutan (winner of the first X prize for private space flight) has theorized about the cultural and developmental pre-requisite for periods of great technological breakthroughs.  In an analysis of both the pivotal individuals in commercial airlines (H. House etc) and those who are now developing the commercial flight industry there were unique conditions at a young age.  During the early 1900s young children grew up in an era where the first powered aircraft had been invented and the long held dream of human flight had been realized.  Symmetrically, During the 1970s young children witnessed the rapid development of human spaceflight and the moon landing shortly their after.  Both of these periods were steeped in a culture of rapid technological change and immense social enthusiasm for flight.  Perhaps one of the most overlooked elements of technoligcal breakthroughs is the genius that results from young children becoming passionate enough to dedicate enough time in something before graduating college.  Perhaps it is true that genius level skill is the only thing that can create the big explosions in technological progress.

There are also operational benifits of having people that truely love what they are working on.  People that love what they do are willing to make large investments of time and money in projects without clear returns and this entrepreneurial spirit is required when you are doing things that a large number of experts don’t think is possible.  This is one factor that gives entrepreneurial companies an edge when competing with large and well funded incombants.  The behaviors of people and the things that they hone their skills doing seems to be an important and often overlooked driving factor in the pace of technological change.

Selection Pressure: Resource Scarcity, harsh environments, War and sports

There seem to be four major selection pressures that act to topple the reign of incumbent technologies in order to free energy and materials for the growth of new ones.  Where selection pressures are felt the most harshly and sufficent “technical diversity” is present because of a period of creativity on the sidelines this is where the biggest new approaches will emerge.

Maybe technology is Lamarck in it’s development.  Each species “learning” through incremental change over time until it adds up to a fundamentally better performance.  This technology species can then “have sex” with others and give other species the fitness it found by trial and error.

The issue of global warming as a result of using carbon-based stored energy resources is a different and not less important point.  Both camps would likely argue that it is unwise to drastically increase the earth’s atmospheric temperature because the outcomes are not well understood.  It is possible that global warming would return the planet to a Jurassic climate and result in a global flourish of life.  On the other hand, rising sea levels could completely wipe out large quantities of biodiversity and force the costly and potentially dangerous re-settlement of large coastal cities.

Chris Anderson of Wired magazine makes a compelling point for the power of waste while assuming that resource scarcity and peak oil logic are a relic of a by-gone era.  Here is the most compelling segment:

“…Nature is so wasteful because scatter-shot strategies are the best way to do what mathematicians refer to as fully exploring “the potential space.” Imagine a desert with two pools of water separated by some distance. If you’re a plant growing next to one of those pools, you can follow one of two different reproductive strategies. You can drop seeds near your roots, where there’s a pretty good chance they’ll find water. This is safe but soon leads to crowding. Or you can toss the seeds to the wind and let them float far away. This means that almost all will die, but it’s the only way to find that second pool of water, where life can expand into a new niche, perhaps a richer one. The way to get from what the mathematicians call a local maximum to the global maximum is to explore a lot of fruitless minims along the way. It’s wasteful, in a sense, but it can pay off in the end.

The science fiction writer Cory Doctorow calls this “thinking like a dandelion.” He writes: “The disposition of each—or even most—of the seeds isn’t the important thing, from a dandelion’s point of view. The important thing is that every spring, every crack in every pavement is filled with dandelions. The dandelion doesn’t want to nurse a single precious copy of itself in the hopes that it will leave the nest and carefully navigate its way to the optimum growing environment, there to perpetuate the line. The dandelion just wants to be sure that every single opportunity for reproduction is exploited!”

This is how to embrace waste. Seeds are too cheap to meter. It feels wrong, even alien, to throw so much away, but it’s the right way to take advantage of abundance.”  -Read More

This model of innovation suggests that in the context of looming energy scarcity and habitat destabilization the best strategy is to double down on our investment in technology R&D and a ramping up of our level of “useful waste”.  This in no way suggests that we should stop seeking to reduce the footprint of our building designs or bike to work but it may intale continuing to recycle instead of re-use despite the difference in energy footprint.  New exploration of the solution space requires increased market support in order to fund and justify the effort.

It is easy to come up with hypothetical ways that it could be true that increasing technology development could provide solutions.  For one, the large-scale adoption of fiber-optic high-speed internet will enable better video conferencing and other tela-presence services (including more senses) in the near term.  Very high bandwidth combined with the requisite better computer interfaces may make commuting to work a thing of the past.  In this way, technology can concor scarcity as long as we give it enough time to develop such capabilities.

In conclusion

It is important for us to begin to invest heavily in low-cost ways to make our communities less energy hungry because it will make them more resiliant but also because it will make building the “real solutions” in the form of novel technoloies more cost effective.  A synthesis also suggests that people should increase their use of new products and be willing to buy them despite the near term increases in carbon emissions and economic risks they entail because these new technology products are stepping stones to “real solutions”.

Final Note

If we were able to muster the collective will to spend a great deal of public money to develop a wide range of technologies that could lead to increased quality of life and reduced energy consumption this would reduce the period of time we need to support change while sacrificing near term security.

In order to achieve these amazing results both public support and public funding were required.

What will it take for the US to return to a past of bold ideas and bold actions?  Can China fill this need in the future or must the US awaken from acquiescence and again prosecute bold projects?

Temperature and pressure on Venus:



Notice the temperature in the atmosphere and pressure at an altitude of 50km.   Remember 273K is zero degrees C or the melting point of water.  Venus also has about 1 earth gravity.

Read about the idea  HERE

Diaspora Guys

…just raised 200K to start up an open-source project.  That has to be some sort of record!

The signs that the project is progressing in the direction of increasing transparency are evident.  The milestones for the project have been updated for public viewing while all feedback on the team’s plans is being processed through the public forum of twitter.  The twitter feedback concept allows everyone in the diaspora community to respond in real time to ideas or worries hopefully staring the project in a more productive direction.

Some ideas to further the chances that Diaspora is successful:

• Provide visibility into financial statements for the people that put money up in support of the project
• Allow backers to review milestone completion on a weekly basis
• hold a weekly web-cast on tinychat.com to go through things.

learn more about the project on their PAGE HERE

Some prior projects that leading to this design are as follows:

Wing suits are another way that people have proven personal flight:

Update:

A really amazing new development in personal transit.  Check out this “smallest personal helicopter”…  it may also be the cheapest.

Update 2:

Drop technology featured in James Bond film. “SwitchBlade” from Kinetic Aerospace: Website

New Zealand project with full flight controls.

Skyboard Website

Update:

SWIFT Footlanding Glider

I found the site of a company that has continued to develop the SWIFT concept and has created a powered version that deserves inspection.  See it all HERE.

Ever since that first exposure I have been on the lookout for evidence that this seemingly very important trend away from IP constrained and very expensive biotechnology to a new sort that would look more like software development.  In light of this general insight I have been on the lookout for signs that the results of synthetic biology are being felt.

Aside from the professional labs at MIT, Harvard and other top universities that are working to crack difficult problems associated with developing standardized biological parts and the systems to manage them there are two other interesting institutions in Boston that I have been aware of and watching.  The first institution is the iGEM  Contest (to be held iGEM 2009 Jamboree October 30 – November 2, 2009 at MIT, Cambridge, MA).  This event has been growing steadily in number of participants and utility of project results ever since it’s first Jamboree in the summer of 2004 following the first iGEM meeting in 2003.  One of the most impressive results of last year’s iGEM meeting is a Caltech project to create pro-biotic bacterial communities that produce vitamins and other chemicals for the body.  This is a technology approach that could result in yet unknown health advantages when taken in the context of other systems of determinant continuous adaptive drug delivery such as the portable insulin pump which eliminates the long-term side-effects of type one diabetes.  Moreover, what health benefits could be attained through bacterial production of the range of vitamins proscribed by Ray Kurzweil and sold via his online store.  iGEM is demonstrating the importance of Synthetic biology not just as an interesting facet to the present tsunami of biotechnology innovations but as a disruptive and fundamental new paradigm.

The other important movement forward for synthetic biology is the DIYBio movement which aims to create a “hacker community” focused on developing cheap alternatives to professional lab equipment, collect biological data and conduct low cost genetic engineering.  Previously the DIY Bio movement didn’t have a home in Boston and it’s constituents were encouraged to work out of their homes.  It did however have a vibrant online community of some 600 individuals and over 5 clubs throughout the US.

Long story short…  There is a lab for DIY Biotech among other things in Union Square just outside of Boston and it’s called Willoughby and Baltic for “art industry and technology”.  The lab will operate under the umbrella of a 501c3 nonprofit corporation which suggests that it will continue in the service of the community.  An uncommon element with this lab is that despite being a nonprofit they have incorporated a revenue model from the onset which should help them sustain and grow the lab.  The fee structure is as follows: $100/month, 3 month minimum Pre-pay discounts: 3 months for $275 6 months for $550 Entire Year for $1000 24 x 7.  A little pricey for students but it would be worth it if you are working on a product of any sort.

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