Electrohydrodynamic force produced by a wire-to-cylinder dc corona discharge in air at atmospheric pressure

Electrohydrodynamic Thrust for In-Atmosphere Propulsion

“…Recent experiments [5,24,25] widely confirm the trends of the EHD propulsion theory derived by Christenson and Moller [21] in 1967. Inside the drift region, the charge density ρ is only due to ions.…”

“…A similar relationship was derived in [5]. It failed to predict accurately Θ at low voltage, but did however provide a good estimation of the influence of parameters.…”

“…He also found an electric-to-kinetic energy conversion efficiency lower than 1%. Since then, electric wind has been measured by different groups [3][4][5][6], and it has never exceeded [7] 10 m ⋅ s −1 , and the efficiency hardly reached 1.7% [8]. The maximum velocity of the ionic wind can be increased by using multistage electrode configurations [9].…”

“…These studies concluded that the thrust density was too low to propel conventional aircraft and that the efficiency would strongly decrease with altitude. However, significant improvements are possible [5,[24][25][26][27] using adequate electrode shapes and arrangements. Furthermore, Masuyama and Barret [24] recently highlighted the fact that one relevant parameter for comparing in-atmosphere propulsive systems is the specific power consumption.…”

“…A simple approximate relationship between Θ and Ψ can be derived. Following [5], we assume that we operate far from the inception point V c ≪ V so that i ≈ CV 2 ∕l. Substituting into Eqs.…”