Ionic Fan - Is it really this easy?

[Hawk Tuah]

Just been reading this....

http://www.inventgeek.com/Projects/IonCooler2/Overview.aspx

Watch the movie clip. I was expecting a virtually non existant whaft.

http://www.inventgeek.com/Projects/IonCooler2/Images/P1010384.MOV

Is it really that easy to make a ionic fan like that. If so that HAS to be my next mod!

 

[Hawk Tuah]

Well I've now ordered all the parts required to build this.

Just gotta wait for the Ion generator to be delivered. I bough the same one he used.

Dont think I'll try this on my new C2D rig though.

 

[Hawk Tuah]

Ditto - If it really was this easy then why have NASA only begun to deploy experimental ion drive spacecraft which are essentially the safe technology (OK slight variation on application, but physics and principle are the same)

Why would NASA spend millions developing rocket engines when they could just use a ducted fan.....

 

[Hawk Tuah]

I cant see how this will make a lot of air movement.

Me neither. I was expecting the faintest waft. But then I saw the video. Its one of those things that unless you see it in the flesh, you'll never beleive it.

Ionic generators are used in marine aquiriums to clean the water. They generate and electrical charge and this cannot be good for computers as static charges aint good for computers. If you go outside after an electrical storm and smell the air it is the ion charge in the air that toy will smell. I used the same principal while keeping marine fish to kill bacteria in the tank.

The guys original design was to have the unit inside. When people pointed out the charged ions may effect the machine, he moved it outside for his V2.

 

[Hawk Tuah]

and trying to 'perfect' the design of my robot wars robot weapon the ULTIMATE flipper using magnetism

Well, its gonna have to be rather powerful. Wheely big cheese can throw another robot out the ring from the middle. Not sure how your magnetic tickle stick is going to be the 'ultimate' compared to that.

bleh

You missed my point. There aint no air in space, so this wouldn't work. The ion drive NASA have been working on would be somewhat different. Ie like a ducted fan, it would be useless in a vacuum.

 

[Hawk Tuah]

amg, robot wars is still going?! aint seen it on TV with craig charles for years so presumed it had finished.

on a different note, would something like charged Fan Guards work?

say 3 so you have 2 charged the same and 1 charged differently to de-ionise the ionised air? grill would probably create a better draft than a few wires as its got a greater surface area. would look something like my crappy diagram below :

| | | <- the grills in a parralil line up down a tube
+ - + <- the charge on the grills (could be 2 negative 1 positive?)

disclaimer: again, im no einstein so i could be talking crap

Eh. There has just been a new series of robot wars which has just finished with the final last weekend. Razor won it at last. Its on channel 5 on a sunday. Well, was.

Were some really great battles, and Wheely Big Cheese was amazing. Never seen a robot with so much power. It literally threw a robot from the middle of the ring, about 15 foot in the air all the way out of the ring. Unfortunately it conked out in the semi finals.


Check it out

 

[Hawk Tuah]

lol its called a 'linear magnetic accelerator' look it up, its a brilliant principal, we were trying to use physics to design the ultimate robot wars machine, i mean a flipper based on a railgun we built a minuture one in college in spare time (breaks between class) using copper rods and many many many capacitors, and everytime we pushed the little button the projectile welded the two rails together, so i though a ceramic or graphite slug would work better for this flipper design, the problem is it would have to be ejected and reloaded after each flip we also toyed with the idea of using a gas turbine as the machines main powerplant but im not sure if its against the rules and another thing was recoiling armour proberbly well over the weight limit mind

Sounds interesting. However in Robot Wars, the KISS strategy usually works best. When I was at uni my mech eng department was working on fulerine strings. We were thinking of using one as a kind of cheese slice. Then adding fulerine armour plating. Now that would have kicked ass! I'm sure reactive armour is banned. You can't have any kind of projectile or explosives. One of my ideas was a nitro hammer. Inject a small amount of nitroglicerine into a cavity in the end of a hammer and hit them with that. BANG - and the robots gone.

Oh and linear magnetic accelerators. You mean like they use on those floating trains, and roller coasters.

Edit: and NASA's DS1 engine doesn't need air or anything, it uses xenon gas, which gets ionised via bombardment with electrons, then a magnetic field projects the ions out the back of the craft, generating forward thrust, pretty simple stuff really

That was my point. The design I'm going to build would be useless in space because there's no air, whereas the NASA one works in a vacuum.

 

[Hawk Tuah]

a *** weapon is a good idea except *** is well, highly explosive and could end up with the robot using it going boom too the magnetic accelerator would be handy but you'd need an engine to generate the electricity needed, a generator making a lot of current some capacitor banks to store the charge, plus the current would heat up the copper rails making them really hot, so they'd have to be cooled down between firings to avoid the whole welding problem or causing a fire, the armour was a good idea as well, made from four layers, the top layer being laminated polystyrene (in modular blocks, similar to space shuttles heatshield), the second layer was an aluminium meshing (the styrene blocks were mounted to this), the third was a rather thick layer of foam and the fourth layer being sheet aluminium (weighed virtually nothing) so when a weapon hit the outside the outer layer was meant to act as an ablative layer, it was there specifically to absorb kinetic energy and to be sacrificed (hence why it was little blocks like the shuttles heat shield) all the wiring was gonna go through aluminium foiled PVC piping to be routed to the specific areas of the machine, all the control mechanisms were going to be mounted in 'boxes' to protect from fire and other breaches of the armour, the powerplant would have been a housemade gas turbine and DC electric generator and two 12V starter motors driving two catapillar style tracks, also adds to the modular theme of the machine, pity it was never built all designed on paper and in studio max 8

Ha ha - sounds heavy, inefficient and very likely to break with the slightest knock.

While you're there charging your welding rod, sitting underneath polystyrene armour, your opponent would have got underneath you and flipped you over onto the arena flamer.

 

[Hawk Tuah]

why did it get censored?

what did you type. N.O.S?

Things like that got censors as they 'lowered the tone' around here.

 

[Hawk Tuah]

lol jesus the censored me cause i typed that, thats just bizarre, wasn't aware nitrous oxide was illegal or anything, nothing on forum rules about it?

Its not. Its just the acronyms. Plus other 'l33t' speek, as such.

 

[Hawk Tuah]

Where are all the mods today? It's been an hour with that swearie up, slackers

Weren't a load of them disbanded?

I received the ion generator through the post two days ago. I guess I've got all the bits now.....

Just a bit worried about plugging this into my computers PSU. I may look for a 12v transformer instead.

Oh and I've got to get the other wire. (got the guitar string).

My glue gun is at my parents house, and I wont be there till next the weekend. So I'll probably have a go at it then.