With our range of Active Plasma Accelerators we have once again proved our unrivaled competence and innovative power by even generalizing the concept by also adding all the other possibilities of the plasma acceleration for air-augmented and air-breathing engines.
By applying an Active Plasma Accelerator (APA) the speed of be- fore ionized air at the intake of a hypersonic engine and of the still ionized exhaust at its nozzle is increased further by applying the technologies of ion thrusters. Such ion thrusters
electrothermal/-thermodynamic,
electromagnetic, and
magnetoplasmadynamic,
could produce an extremely high specific impulse and exhaust velocity, which makes it about 20 times better than liquid rockets. In this way the APA systems drastically increase the performance of scramjet engines with the mindblowing result that its specific impulse and speed can be heightened by up to 8 times (Active Hypersonic Engine) in comparison to high performance air-breathing engines (NASP and our hypersonic engine) and makes it applicable for interstellar flights. That means an Isp of nearly up to 40,000 s for a hydrogen powered ramjet engine in the best case at Mach 5.
Introduction
For one of the first systems with Active Plasma Acceleration the applic- ation of a superconducting magnet in a Hall Effect Thruster (HET) configuration was proposed (electrostatic/Coulomb force). Another possibility is to design a plasma accelerator like an applied-field MagnetoPlasmaDynamic (MPD) Thruster (MPDT) (electromagnetic/Lorentz force).
Types
Different types of ion thruster technologies can be applied:
electrostatic/Coulomb force
- Hall effect and
- electroplasmadynamic (applied-field)
electromagnetic/Lorentz force
- pulsed inductive,
- magnetoplasmadynamic (applied-field)
- electrothermal/-thermodynamic
- magnetic field oscillating amplified,
- pulsed plasma,
- ion cyclotron heating and
- arcjet
and
electromagnetic/ponderomotive force
Simplicity
Our proposition to apply the technology of the electrothermal/-thermodynamic ion thruster is also very interesting, because it ionizes propellant by the application of Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation (LASER) and Radio Frequency (RF) conceptually in the same electromagnetic principle as the technology of the Plasma Anti-Friction (PAF) generator, before the ion thruster accelerates the propellant as a Plasma Accelerator (PA). In this way one general system can be used for different functionalities and even at different places which reduces complexity even in these fields. Once again an innovation by us.