I agree that an innovation of this magnitude would have a huge impact on naval propulsion if it were publicly available though I’d imagine the tech would be locked down to a ridiculous level. It’s likely destined to only appear in nuclear submarines.
Well, people are talking about 90% efficiency up-thread. You can't need unobtainable levels of power and still have 90% efficiency, as people move boats around every day.
Also, about the need for a coolant, well, the fixed costs for it are on the order of a few $100/m on most cities nowadays. If people start to use lots of it, the fixed costs will fall to zero. (The variable cost isn't high, but it also doesn't dictate the boat size.)
You can absolutely have an energy requirement cliff that has to be exceeded for a thing to work before you can even measure it's efficiency. Trying to push something from standstill vs. keeping it moving.
If it needs unobtainable levels of power, that means it's not efficient. If it's efficient you can use a diesel generator in place of your diesel engine and obtain the same amount of power.
Not quite. It might be efficient, but only if you need megawatt-level propulsion power.
This is not uncommon in engineering in general. There are many, many examples of devices that are highly efficient but only at higher power levels/speeds.
The government can and does lock down intellectual property for national security reasons.
The US government effectively locked down Juliet Marine Systems' IP, and gave the inventor no compensation for doing so. Took about more than 5 years for the inventor get any relief.
The US government won't be able to lock down a company in Sweden or Turkey. It's not like the principles of MHD propulsion are in any way secret. It's just that we now have much better superconducting magnets.
There's no reason to assume that. A ton of things DARPA pathfinds are commercialized, including the globe spanning network we're using to converse atm.
I'm not sure it would be restricted so much as just way too expensive to be practical. There is also the practical considerations of generating 20T magnetic fields out in the real world and around people.
Yeah, that seems to be the way it always goes. It's not actually all that difficult to build an AESA radar in your garage, it's just very hard to get enough of the types of parts needed for a useful one without nation state level funding. The FPGAs they use are on Digikey....for 5-10k ea.
Or on the vessel itself it would have to be shielded for the people and for any equipment.
I've seen experiments where a device using a paddle was put against a person's head and a strong magnetic field emitted. It was a TV reporter for Discovery Channel Canada and her jaw convulsed, she did not look pleased.
I think the experiment was about spirituality of all things. How to induce a feeling of a presence to a person. I believe it was called the God helmet but in the video I saw it was a paddle.
"Trans-cranial magnetic stimulation" — it has both been called "the god helmet" and has been used in that way.
IIRC it's a pulsed field to induce electric fields in your brain, and also has an extremely short range.
Somewhat more significant to human health is that magnetic material can be rapidly drawn towards the magnets, with the force on a steel office chair can exceed its own structural capacity in standard medical magnetic equipment: https://youtu.be/6BBx8BwLhqg
At very high field strengths, you also need to account for "your blood is electrically conductive, and electrical conductors resist motion when in a magnetic field due to induced electrical currents". According to test subjects, this "tingles".
At the most extreme fields strengths we can currently make, you also have to account for the water in your body being diamagnetic and repelling the magnets, but we can't ask any of the test subjects what that feels like as they were a frog and a rat because that's all that would fit in the tube.
Google scholar shows that that patent 'author' has three patents
1. Piezoelectricity-induced High Temperature Superconductor
2. Craft using an inertial mass reduction device
3. High frequency gravitational wave generator
And I think with those three "inventions" one could construct a space-ship that could travel to Alpha Centauri at a meaningful fraction of 'c'.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Whatever is going on here, it's hard to take this document as evidence for a working room temperature superconductor...
