Designing a Futuristic Magnetic Turbine (MHD drive)

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Let's make a big one together.

Just a tip for your demonstrations, try adding fine mica powder to the water instead of ink. The mica shows flow and looks really cool, but most importantly it shows basically every detail of turbulence, flow and direction very clearly. (Think of those cool paint mixing videos with the insane swirls and colors.) and they come in basically any color and you only need to add it once and it will just continue to work without constantly adding dye or particulates. We used this technique in school when we learned about fluid dynamics and I use them all the time for resin work, so they’re readily available now because of the popularity of epoxy crafting.

When you run a current through salt water, you get hydrogen and chlorine forming by electrolysis. Chlorine is highly corrosive (even compared to salt water), poisonous, and explosive in combination with hydrogen. Since the gases form as bubbles, surely this process is also noisy. not silent at all. This would pollute the environment exponentially and is better off remaining shelved.

from the data presented here, you can easily calculate the efficiency to be 0.12%. A ship propeller has a hydrodynamic efficiency of about 60%. That is a factor of 500. There is much more Energy in the electrolysis, and electrolysis is needed for the current.

man, remember me when you're a billionaire, ok?

The one thing that i am not really sure about this idea is that you could actually see the dye shift colours (a possible indication of pH change as Sodium Hydroxide is being produced trough the electrolysis of salt water). Also, the chlorine produced gets bond to the sodium Hydroxide to make sodium chlorate. Not sure if alot of ships using this technology would produce significant amounts of either sodium Hydroxide or Sodium Chlorate thst could affect marine life. I mean sodium Hydroxide is corrosive to metal and skin

Was that hydrogen bubbles?

結合特斯拉水閥會不會提升流體速度?

Great video! A few suggestions. As there is no more moving parts in an MHD drive, you don't necessarily have to put the engine inside like a conventional motor. Instead, you can put the engine outside ;) i.e. deploy the MHD interaction everywhere around the external fuselage, making it an "external flow MHD accelerator" with the benefit of acting on the wavefront and the drag along the whole wetted area. Another trick: when you glue the same poles of two 1T magnets together, face-to-face, you nearly double the magnetic flux density and get almost a 2T magnetic field strength right on their junction plane. In addition, in order to avoid electrode corrosion due to electrolysis, it is best to use graphite electrodes, even if steel is better than cooper indeed. Speaking of electrolysis, you are limited by the conductivity of salt water: you could use an acidic bath instead and boost the induced flow velocity even further (except if your aim is to eventually test a boat or submersible down the road). What limits the efficiency of such a small drive is the relative weakness of the magnetic field, and the limited amount of current density that the fluid can bear before electrolysis becomes dominant up to the deleterious situation of thermal blockage, a phenomenon that could be compared to a conventional motor burning due to heat accumulated by the Joule effect (same mechanism). Therefore, you should use a power supply that controls direct current not voltage, to better tune the whole thing, and even calculate precisely the current density J your fluid can accept depending on its electrical conductivity and the surface of your electrodes. Indeed the Lorentz force acting on a fluid is a body force, a force per unit volume, in newtons per cubic meter (in SI units). That's also why the electromagnetic force J×B can be very powerful as it can act on a large volume of fluid. But this is another longer story and I was speaking of the efficiency. Compared to a traditional propeller, the magnetic field B of an MHD drive is akin to the pitch angle of the blades, while the current density J is the rotation speed. With such a low power magnetic field and electric current set too high wrt the fluid (its electrical conductivity), it's like someone who would use a propeller with blades having an infinitesimal pitch angle. He would have to rotate the propeller at an insane amount of RPMs to barely move. The main thing we're doing in this case is not propulsion, but heating the ambient fluid! That's why MHD drives appear so "inefficient". But they are not: they simply don't have the appropriate input values, as our technology is not yet advanced enough (hint: room-temperature superconducting multitesla electromagnets and powerful yet light and compact electrical power generators onboard).

I’d like to see a boat, but even more a comparison of efficiency between propellers and your drive.

Invented 1966 and tested with an submarine EMS-1 at the coast of California... Also Mitshubishi worked on it in the 1980-90s. They need about 4 Tesla to make it work. Probably does not work with sweet water rivers.

Would this cause problems for sharks electro receptors?

Oh man, a boat with these things would be awesome! Not sure if you meant toy/model boat or something bigger, but it'd be neat to see how many it takes to move a canoe or something small-but-mannable

This also ends up being a really cool way to get chlorine gas. 😆 Jokes aside, this is a very impressive motor. I wish you the best with your future attempts to optimize it.

Twist it a bit for vortex?

i was just thinking, if you took a turbine like yours adding to a hydroplane boat, could you produce enough hydrogen to propel the craft if ignited?

Have you considered using aluminum or Graphite for the electrodes? Aluminum should transfer the same amount of power, but at a lower weight, increasing efficiency since it has to push less mass through the water and may also be a less expensive material. Likewise, graphite is probably a little more expensive, it should have electrical conductivity properties, weight even less than Aluminum and be more resistant to corrosion both from electrolysis, but also from the marine environment as well. Brass/bronze is used a lot in marine environments for its durability and resistance to corrosion, but I think it would be even heavier and more expensive to use, although I have no proof, just conjecture.

That's awesome! Also I think you just gave me an idea

How much power did you use and where did you get power from sir.