Make it smaller is the right approach; at the nanoscale, electrostatic forces are a hundred thousand times stronger than electromagnet forces, with the same electrode spacing.
@@louroboros⚠️ God has said in the Quran: 🔵 { O mankind, worship your Lord, who created you and those before you, that you may become righteous - ( 2:21 ) 🔴 [He] who made for you the earth a bed [spread out] and the sky a ceiling and sent down from the sky, rain and brought forth thereby fruits as provision for you. So do not attribute to Allah equals while you know [that there is nothing similar to Him]. ( 2:22 ) 🔵 And if you are in doubt about what We have sent down upon Our Servant [Muhammad], then produce a surah the like thereof and call upon your witnesses other than Allah, if you should be truthful. ( 2:23 ) 🔴 But if you do not - and you will never be able to - then fear the Fire, whose fuel is men and stones, prepared for the disbelievers.( 2:24 ) 🔵 And give good tidings to those who believe and do righteous deeds that they will have gardens [in Paradise] beneath which rivers flow. Whenever they are provided with a provision of fruit therefrom, they will say, "This is what we were provided with before." And it is given to them in likeness. And they will have therein purified spouses, and they will abide therein eternally. ( 2:25 ) ⚠️ Quran
Anyone interested in electrostatic motor technology should look into the work of Oleg Jefimenko, his motors could put out some serious torque. And yes, putting the input through a HV transformer increases the total output, the big ones only take microamps to operate.
It's neat, but precarious - a small change in humidity or being spritzed by honeydew (literally feels like a misty rain if there are enough of the right kind of bugs in the trees above you) could disable or radically alter the characteristics. I've fooled around with quite a few electrostatic devices, and this one here is mostly a triumph of ultra-lightweight solar cells and awesomely tiny high voltage ceramic capacitors alongside high voltage diodes the size of fleas. It's fantastic, no argument, but it's not going to be powering practical applications any time soon. It could hold promise for extremely high pressure exoplanet environments, however, as the dielectric value of such atmospheres may be much higher alongside greater density and, potentially, lower gravity.
I mistakenly thought it would be using electro hydrodynamics with no moving parts like the lifters but an electrostatic motor is still cool. I wonder if an ultracap sandwich can be built into the rotor/ stator blades to hold more charge. I wonder how they got the voltage transformer so small.
The brushes are very low friction. They are thin filaments that lightly touch the rotor panels. You can see them at 1:02. Two tiny flaps that extend off each stator electrode. It's a kilovolt electrostatic system, so it's not transferring current, it's just charging and discharging the rotor panels.
Finally an invention which has a solid usecase! These can be used to check wether windows are open or not! Say for example you forgot the window open upstairs, upon walking up the stairs there would be the possibility of two scenarios: A: If you left the window open you will find this flying machine on the floor, since it was barely touched by a draft and instantly crashed to the floor. B:As the window was closed the magnificent invention proves that the window was closed as it did not crash violently.
Looks like the brushes are very thin filaments that lightly touch the rotor panels. It's a kilovolt electrostatic system, so it doesn't need to transfer a ton of current, it just needs to charge and discharge the thin rotor panels.
@@zinckensteel I think that's true for typical electrostatic motors, but judging from the diagrams from the paper on ResearchGate, the brushes do barely touch the stator blades.
Nope. Tesla's Egg of Columbus was a magnetic device. This is only electrostatic charge, no magnetism at all. Tesla's Egg of Columbus generated a rotating magnetic field by using coils and an iron core under a wooden plate. A copper "egg" on top of the plate would be trapped in that magnetic field and spin like a top.
The scope of their project is to address the short endurance of small drones. They achieve that bigger drones didn't have this problem, batteries and solar panels scale well on larger designs
I'm pretty sure MIT built a giant sized one that they were flying around a few years ago. It was only being flown indoors at the time though. This is all ultra early research, but then. So we're the wright brothers once.
At the end if you need battery to work it real life applications, then why to add more weight of solar panels to it? 😂😅😂 It's better to wait for lightweight battery then .
solar thermal wind combo wavt turbine then, why do you need to conver to electricity when you can use expanding solar heated air as the thrust, you also get 100% of the energy, not 20%. in any case thats better what currently is. solar airboat glider would be the simplest, with flexible ultra-light solar sail cloth wing. but with the solar heat engine, just make the inside drum or outside drum hot air flow circular or directional, if you want solar thermal rotor or hover crafts. yep even hot air hover craft boats.
This reminds me of the ufos you see nowadays that have a rapid heating and cooling on thermal cam, thats probably refrigerant cycling gathering energy and spinning a turbine, presumably 3d printed.
I always laugh at the applications in nature. The device in question will never be able fulfil any of the applications they list. They should have said that this could be used as a weak and desk fan, then I wouldnt have to write this comment 😂
It is true that there is still this silly need to answer the "but what is it good for" question with such early-stage research. They've built a stupidly light flying machine. That's cool! Let's just take it from there and we'll figure things out as we go along.
That's because it's exactly that, a concept. A lot of things started put pretty trashy. And it's up to the people with more ingenuity and creativity than you will ever have, to make this into a real application.
