Historical research guide · 0547 · 1999

Fabrication of large bulk ceramic superconductor disks for gravity modification experiments and performance of YBCO disks under EM field excitation

Ronald Koczor · David Noever

In one minute

Before anyone can test Eugene Podkletnov’s report of a weight change above a spinning superconductor, someone has to make the disc — and that turns out to be the hard part. Ronald Koczor and David Noever of NASA Marshall Space Flight Center took that job on. Their team worked out a repeatable way to press and heat-treat the ceramic superconductor yttrium barium copper oxide into large annular discs about 30 centimetres across, 7 centimetres in the bore and a centimetre thick — bigger than the roughly 25-centimetre size that the original reports say matters — then measured the discs’ material properties and ran them under alternating-current levitation fields from tens of hertz up to a few kilohertz. This is the unglamorous half of an extraordinary claim: build the source component to specification, publish the recipe, publish what the discs do when you excite them. Everything downstream in the NASA gravity-modification campaign, including its published sensitivity limits, rests on these discs existing.

Connection

Chapter 11 turns on whether a large, correctly made, electromagnetically driven superconducting disc does anything to the local gravitational field, and this is the paper that made such discs routinely available inside a NASA programme; chapter 1 uses it as the example of the fabrication step that decides what a replication is actually testing.

From the source

A repeatable fabrication process for large bulk ceramic superconductor items was developed at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, producing annular discs of yttrium barium copper oxide with rough dimensions of 30 centimetres outer diameter, 7 centimetres inner diameter and 1 centimetre thickness, routinely rather than as one-offs.NASA technical reports server record 19990068007, sentences 3 to 5; record 19990102615
The disc size was chosen because it is the reported condition: others had indicated that large annular discs on the order of 25 centimetres in diameter, together with alternating-current levitation fields, play an essential role in the observed effect — so the NASA discs were made to exceed that scale.NASA technical reports server record 19990068007, sentence 2
The fabricated discs were tested under alternating-current levitation fields ranging from 45 hertz to about 3 kilohertz, and various material parameters of the discs were measured, with successful results depending on the material’s mechanical characteristics and on the pressure and heat-treatment protocols.NASA technical reports server records 19990068007 and 19990102615
The same NASA Marshall campaign that these discs were built for reports its gravimeter result as a limit rather than an effect: with magnetic shielding, thermal control and buoyancy compensation, and a gravimeter resolving better than one part in a billion of unit gravity, changes in acceleration above levitated bulk YBCO in a 0.6 tesla direct-current field with lateral 60 gauss, 60 hertz alternating fields were measured to be less than 2 parts in 100 million of normal gravitational acceleration.NASA technical reports server records 19990104365 and 19990023209
The authors present the work as dual-use hardware: the same large bulk superconducting discs are relevant to space transportation initiatives and to power-storage flywheel technology for spacecraft and satellites.NASA technical reports server records 19990068007 and 19990019627, closing sentences
What to watch: the fabrication recipe is the enabling half of the experiment, and the open question it leaves is the other half — a run in which a disc of this size carries the full specified configuration, the two-layer structure with levitation, rotation and electromagnetic excitation together, which is the measurement that would settle the reported effect.Programme context: NASA records 19990019627 and 19990104365; the specification is stated in Podkletnov and Nieminen, Physica C 203, 441 (1992)

The way in

https://doi.org/10.2514/6.1999-2147

Historical source-access record. This guide links to the original; it does not reproduce the paper text.

SOURCE NOT REACHED IN FULL. The AIAA proceedings paper is held closed by the publisher and both Unpaywall and OpenAlex report no open version, so no text of it is reproduced here. The summary and the claims were written from the Crossref record — Ronald Koczor and David Noever, NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, 35th Joint Propulsion Conference and Exhibit, Los Angeles, 20 June 1999 — together with the NASA technical reports server abstracts for the same programme, read on 2026-09-08: record 19990068007, the Marshall abstract for a June 1999 Joint Propulsion Conference presentation by Koczor, Noever and Robert Hiser recorded there under the variant title ‘Processing of Bulk YBa2Cu3O(7-x) High Temperature Superconductor Materials for Gravity Modification Experiments and Performance Under AC Levitation’, which carries the fabrication and excitation numbers; record 19990102615, ‘Fabrication of Large YBCO Superconducting Disks’; and records 19990023209, 19990019627 and 19990104365, which carry the same team’s gravimeter limits. Locators name the record each number comes from. The NASA records are metadata-only deposits with no attached file, so the numbers quoted are the ones those abstracts state.

How to cite it

Ronald Koczor, David Noever (1999) Fabrication of large bulk ceramic superconductor disks for gravity modification experiments and performance of YBCO disks under EM field excitation doi:10.2514/6.1999-2147

Where it sits in the curriculum

Gravity control and superconductors