EM Drive

The “Impossible” EM Drive’s New Patent Is Now Public — And It’ll Blow You Away

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Short Bytes: The UK Intellectual Property Office has granted a new patent to Roger Shawyer, the inventor of the EM Drive which is a microwave radiation thruster capable of propelling a spacecraft without the need of fuel propellant. The new patent enhances the efficiency and thrust of the EM drive by minimizing the internal doppler shift.

While Elon Musk and SpaceX have been busy posting mac diamonds on social media, there is a man working hard to revolutionize our space travels in the future. It is possible that Musk may end up sending humans to mars by the next decade but if the British scientist Roger Shawyer’s creation reaches reality, our Mars trip would be way cheaper or at least won’t be fuel dependent. Because even a single gram of fuel won’t be used in the EM drive invented by Shawyer.The EM drive or microwave radiation thruster has been in question for not adhering to the basic laws of physics given by Sir Isaac Newton. Notably, the third, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. The EM drive works by making the electromagnetic waves reflect back and forth in a closed frustum-shaped cavity structure theoretically generating enough thrust to propel an entire spacecraft.

The advocates of physics have said that the em drive doesn’t have fuel which means it doesn’t have anything to push backward in order to move forward. But tests conducted by NASA and other scientists have indicated that the EM drive can work.

Shawyer has been working on the EM drive since 1999. He has bagged four patents in the field of work, the first one in 1993 for the basic concept of a cylindrical thruster with a shaped internal dielectric. Now, the UK Intellectual Property Office has granted him a new patent for the microwave radiation thruster. It is an improved design having a non-superconducting specially shaped plate on one end and a superconducting flat plate on the other.

The microwave radiation thruster houses a circularly polarized input antenna and a detector antenna with polarization opposite to the input antenna. A phase locked loop is created between the two antennas and is used to put a check on the input frequency of the waves.

This process minimizes the internal Doppler shift (the change in frequency or wavelength of a wave for an observer moving relative to its source) for the electromagnetic waves and increases the thrust ring acceleration.

emdrive-patent-diagram

“There’s millions of pounds at stake on this particular patent,” Shawyer told IB Times. He has been working with an unnamed UK aerospace company to create the second generation of the EM drive.

Just like the Robert Shawyer’s electromagnetic thruster, Guido Fetta created the Cannae drive based on the EM drive concept. The development of the Cannae drive has been promoted by his company Cannae LLC. Recently, Fetta has also managed to get his thruster tested in the space.

The latest patent for the ‘impossible’ EM Drive has just been made public – and it’s wild

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So crazy, it just might work.

It’s been a big year for the ‘impossible’ EM Drive – a new kind of rocket engine that appears to generate thrust without any kind of exhaust or propellant. Back in May, NASA researchers reported a successful 10-week trial of their EM Drive prototype, and inventor Guido Fetta just got approval to test his own version in space.

Now, the UK Intellectual Property Office has released the latest patent application from British EM Drive inventor Roger Shawyer, and he says millions of pounds rest on the success of design within.

“The patent process is a very significant process, it’s not like an academic peer review where everyone hides behind an anonymous review, it’s all out in the open,” Shawyer told Mary-Ann Russon at the International Business Times.

“This is a proper, professional way of establishing prior ownership done by professionals in the patent office, and in order to publish my patent application, they had to first carry out a thorough examination of the physics in order to establish that the invention does not contravene the laws of physics.”

For the uninitiated, the EM Drive was first invented by Shawyer back in 1999, and despite experimental evidence suggesting that such an engine could work, it’s been courting controversy ever since.

Why? Well, it just so happens to violate one of the most fundamental laws of physics we have: Newton’s Third Law, which states, “To each action there’s an equal and opposite reaction.”

In its most basic form, the EM Drive uses electromagnetic waves as ‘fuel’, creating thrust by bouncing microwave photons back and forth inside a cone-shaped closed metal cavity. This causes the ‘pointy end’ of the EM Drive to accelerate in the opposite direction that the photons are pushing.

But there’s the problem – “an equal and opposite reaction” means something needs to be pushed out the back of propulsion system in order for it to move forwards, and the EM Drive doesn’t have an exhaust.

Newton’s Third Law states that without an exhaust, you can’t produce thrust, but experiments from NASA and a number of other research teams from around the world have shown that not only can the EM Drive produce thrust – it can theoretically produce enough to power an entire spacecraft.

If we can power spacecraft with such an engine, it could replace the incredibly expensive and heavy rocket fuel that’s been a major hurdle in getting us much of anywhere in the Solar System.

As Harold (Sonny) White, leader of the research group over at NASA’s Eaglework Laboratories, says, a crewed mission to Mars in an EM Drive-powered spacecraft could arrive at Mars in a mind-boggling 70 days. That’s less than half the timeNASA has estimated it will take using current technology.

Since Shawyer proposed such a device almost two decades ago, he’s been busy trying to beat everyone else to the punch, applying for patent after patent with every tweak he makes.

His latest patent has just been made public, and describes a new thruster design that features a single flat superconducting plate on one end, with a uniquely shaped, non-conducting plate on the other.

He says this is necessary to minimise the internal Doppler shift – a change in frequency or wavelength of a wave for an observer moving relative to its source – and also keep manufacturing costs down.

“This is pretty significant, because it enables you to easily manufacture these things, and we want to produce thousands of them,” he told Russon at the International Business Times. “The patent makes the construction of a viable superconducting thruster easier, and it will produce a lot of thrust.”

You can access the patent here, but here’s a taste of the contents, with a rundown of just one component – the control circuit:

patent-emShawyer et. al.

According to Russon, Shawyer is working with an unnamed UK aerospace company to develop his second generation EM Drive, which he says will produce thrust many orders of magnitude greater than that observed by NASA’s Eagleworks team or any other laboratory.

We’ll have to wait and see once he gets his invention out of the lab and into space, like this entrepreneur is planning to do in the coming months.

And in the meantime, we’ve got a milestone paper coming up, because the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) has finally confirmedthat a paper by the Eagleworks team has been peer-reviewed and accepted for publication in December.

NASA’s ‘impossible’ EM Drive works: German researcher confirms and it can take us to the moon in just 4 HOURS

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Over the past whole year, there’s been a lot of excitement about the electromagnetic propulsion drive, also known as EM Drive – a logically impossible engine that’s challenged almost everyone’s prospects by continuing to stand up to experimental study. The EM drive is so thrilling because it yields enormous amounts of propulsion that could hypothetically blast us to Mars in only 70 days, without the need for dense and costly rocket fuel. Instead, it’s actually propelled forward by microwaves bouncing back and forth inside a sealed off chamber, and this is what makes the EM drive so powerful, and at the same time so debatable.

As effective as this kind of propulsion may sound, it challenges one of the essential concepts of physics – the conservation of momentum, which states that for anything to be propelled forward, some kind of propellant must be pushed out in the opposite direction. For that reason, the drive was generally laughed at and overlooked when it was designed by English scientist Roger Shawyer in the early 2000s. But a few years later, a group of Chinese researchers decided to construct their own version, and to everyone’s amazement, it really worked. Then an American inventor did the something just like that, and convinced NASA’s Eagleworks Laboratories, supervised by Harold ‘Sonny’ White, to give it a try. And they admitted that it actually works. Now Martin Tajmar, a well-known professor and chairman for Space Systems at Dresden University of Technology in Germany, has worked with his own EM Drive, and has once again revealed that it produces thrust – although for reasons he can’t clarify yet.

Tajmar offered his outcomes at the 2015 American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics’ Propulsion and Energy Forum and Exposition in Florida on 27th of July, and you can read his entire paper here. He has a long history of experimentally testing (and exposing) revolutionary propulsion systems, so his outcomes are a big deal for those looking for outside confirmation of the EM Drive.

Most importantly, his system produced a parallel amount of thrust as was initially forecast by Shawyer, which is more than a few thousand times greater than a typical photon rocket.

So where does all of this leave us with the EM Drive? While it’s fun to speculate about just how revolutionary it could be for humanity, what we really need now are results published in a peer-reviewed journal – which is something that Shawyer claims he is just a few months away from doing, as David Hambling reports for Wired.

So it might turn out that we need to modify some of our laws of physics in order to clarify how the drive actually works. But if that opens up the opportunity of human travel throughout the entire Solar System – and, more significantly, beyond – then it’s a sacrifice we’re certainly willing to make.

The ‘Impossible’ EM Drive That Could Reach Mars in Just 70 Days Actually Works .

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What if there was an engine that would be fast and powerful enough to make interplanetary and even interstellar travel possible?

The Impossible EM Drive That Could Reach Mars in Just 70 Days Actually Works

There is indeed such kind of engine, which is called EM Drive or electromagnetic propulsion drive, and scientists now confirm that it actually works.

According to the estimates, it would take four hours for the EM Drive to get to the Moon and 70 days to get to Mars.

Earlier this year, NASA scientists conducted a series of tests in a vacuum and announcedthat the controversial machine really does work.

Now, researcher Martin Tajmar of the Dresden University of Technology in Germany also confirmed that the engine produces thrust.

But first of all, let’s take a look at how the EM Drive works and why it is so controversial.

Why is the EM Drive considered impossible?

The EM Drive technology was invented by British engineer Roger Shawyer in the early 2000s. However, the invention was not taken seriously by the scientific community because it, in fact, violates a fundamental law in physics called the conservation of momentum.

According to this law, to move forward, an object is required to have a propellant pushing it in the opposite direction. The EM Drive works without a propellant and uses solar energy instead. Its operation is based on electromagnetic waves, which produce electrical energy that is then converted into thrust. Basically, this means that the “impossible” engine operates without fuel.

What is no less controversial about the EM Drive is that scientists still don’t know how exactly it works. The most probable explanation is a process called vacuum polarization, which is believed to generate short-lived subatomic particles in the quantum vacuum. There is a theoretical possibility that the drive converts these particles into plasma and uses them as a fuel.

How powerful is the EM Drive?

The drive could produce thrust ten times greater than a modern ion thruster and several thousand times greater than a photon rocket.

NASA Eagleworks researcher Dr. Harold White estimates that a manned mission would getto Mars in 70 days and to Pluto in 18 months while a trip to the Moon would only take four hours.

As for interstellar travel, this space propulsion technology could make it possible to reach Alpha Centauri in just 100 years while it would take tens of thousands of years with the current technology.

The new findings

Martin Tajmar is probably the best person to evaluate the EM Drive – his scientific research is focused on“Breakthrough Propulsion Physics.” Unlike the Eagleworks scientists, he decided to investigate the possibility of space propulsion based on the negative matter (which is quite difficult to produce) from a theoretical point of view. As a result, he got a similar amount of thrust to what was originally predicted by Shawyer.

Tajmar presented his paper at the American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics’ Propulsion and Energy Forum and Exposition that took place on 27 July.

“Our test campaign cannot confirm or refute the claims of the EM Drive but intends to independently assess possible side-effects in the measurements [sic] methods used so far,” he said. “Nevertheless, we do observe thrust close to the actual predictions after eliminating many possible error sources that should warrant further investigation into the phenomena.”

The next step to the verification of the EM Drive is a peer-reviewed research, and Shawyer claims he will have it in a few months.

However, even after that, the most probable is that the mainstream scientific community will avoid taking the drive seriously because this will lead to a real revolution in physics – something that, as you understand, is not welcomed by conservative scholars.

In any case, let’s hope that one day the EM Drive technology will become a scientific reality and will pave the way for interplanetary and interstellar travel.