GE Adventure

There was some heady stuff we saw at the Global Research Center.

Here’s one of my favorites.  Check out this drawing:

via http://www.pilotstudio.com/ps/ (good site for basic airplane physics)

This is a reasonably simple thing to understand: in the top image, the plane is still flying because the air is flowing around the wing, and is creating lift, because the shape of the wing makes the air move faster on one side vs. the other.  In the lower image, the air is not flowing around the wing shape, and thus is not creating it’s own lift. The plane will stall and potentially crash.   This is not great.

So GE engineers have found a potential solution, using plasma- the 4th state of matter.  Science, FTW!

Ok so plasma, a super simple explaination is this:

In a solid, molecules are not moving (much).  In a liquid, molecules are moving around.  In a gas, molecules are moving around more, with more energy.  In plasma, it is a gas-like distribution of molecules, but the electrical state of the molecules is excited.  Like super excited – in other states, the molecules are stable, but in plasma the  electrical bonds of the molecules are breaking down.  It is generally VERY HOT.

So there is the term “cold plasma” which is not so much cold, as it is not extremely hot, just really hot.  Its sort of the experimental safe plasma, and this example, it is created by taking two types of metal with a small distance between them, like a plastic film, and running electricity through the metal, and basically creating plasma as the electricity jumps from one metal to another.

Here’s a clip of the material:

Ok now the cool bit, is using that to DESTROY AIR:

So what you can do with this, in aerospace or for a turbine, is that you could run these strips along the length of a wing, and turn it on, and in the picture up top, when the plane was stalling ?  well, the plasma would break apart the molecular bond of the air, and it would create a less dense area of air, and the wind would stick to the wing of the plane, and the plane wouldn’t stall/crash.

This is super interesting to think about.  We need a better demo, it woudl be cool to see this at a larger scale, or faster even.   It would be interesting to see this visualized in other contexts.  My first thought was even just trying model airplane examples, with small cameras?