RF resonant cavity thruster (EM Thruster) pass initial vacuum tests for JSC Eagleworks!

originally posted by: TEOTWAWKIAIFF
Yet it has. Very strange.

But a lot of the 'successes' were in weird things like the control group that wasn't supposed to be doing anything.

When you get down to this tiny level of thrust, it's hard to separate out the other effects. OTOH, if he can get a pound, much less a ton of thrust, then you get instant validation of your concept.

a reply to: Bedlam

GAH! I cannot select text to quote the site. So, a short quote and here's the link.

This appears to conclusively prove emdrive works for propulsion in terms of lab work.

Nextbigfuture.com, Nov 5, 2016 - New NASA Emdrive paper shows force of 1.2 millinewtons per kilowatt in a Vacuum and a low thrust pendulum and tests were at 40, 60 and 80 watts.

I went and looked for the actual paper and google reported back "leaked NASA paper". So it is not an official release from NASA but more like a sneak peak. With errors taken into account the thing actually works! They also say that it is more thrust than use of light sail (not sure what the size comparison is). 60 kw to get 70 mn of force without using any propellant... crazy!

a reply to: Bedlam

The prototype EmDrive built by the German researchers was a copper cavity with the same dimensions as the prototype tested by NASA in 2016. Although they limited the power supplied to the EmDrive to just 2 watts, their sensors were able to measure roughly 4 micro-Newtons of thrust. Extrapolating from this data, that means that their EmDrive prototype had a thrust-to-power ratio of about 2 milliNewtons per kilowatt, which is almost twice the thrust-to-power ratio achieved at NASA (1.3 milliNewtons per kilowatt).

Yet the German researchers noted that when they changed the direction that the EmDrive was facing, the direction of the thrust changed, but the level of thrust did not, even when the EmDrive was oriented in such a way that any applied power should produce zero thrust.

“This clearly indicates that the ‘thrust’ is not coming from the EmDrive, but some electromagnetic interaction,” the researchers wrote in their paper. “Although we used twisted or coaxial cables as much as possible, some magnetic fields will eventually leak through our cables and connectors.”

When they calculated the forces resulting from a combination of Earth’s magnetic field, the length of their cables and the electric current flowing through them, they found that the result was equal to a few micro-Newtons, which is comparable to the ‘thrust’ they had observed in the vacuum chamber. “We therefore suspect that the interaction of the power feeding for the amplifier with the Earth’s magnetic field masked any real thrusts that could be below our observed value,” they wrote. In a future test, the researchers said they planned to add Mu-metal sheets to the setup that would shield the device from these unwanted outside electromagnetic influences. Yet as they note in their paper, this type of shielding was not used during the NASA experiments.

motherboard.vice.com, May 21, 2018 - SpaceDrive project to explore possible sources of error in EmDrive experiments. Their first experiment identified a possible source of false positives in past successful EmDrive tests.

New results! The German team built there own from specs. They micro ground down surfaces and tried all kinds of mitigation for cross-talk. They even calculated that at full power they might influence their specifically designed measurement tools so backed the power down.

As noted, they got thrust! Yeah, it does still work. But then they turned it in several directions. Seem perpendicular to the power cables was subtle enough to detect a movement through an EM field. They did some maths including the earth's magnetic field and lengths of their power cords, lo and behold, they have some kind of magnetic interaction.

Which is interesting in and of itself. Especially considering how metamaterial research is growing these days. EM thrust from the vacuum might not work, but maybe get some kind of magnetic boost from Mother Earth herself?

(Miss you brother!!)