Historical research guide · 0906 · 2018
The SpaceDrive project – Developing revolutionary propulsion at TU Dresden
Martin Tajmar · Matthias Kößling · Marcel Weikert · Maxime Monette
In one minute
Martin Tajmar and his team at the Institute of Aerospace Engineering in Dresden set out here what the SpaceDrive project is for. Their premise is that propellantless propulsion is the right architecture for interstellar flight, and that the propellantless options already in hand — photon rockets and solar sails — deliver so little thrust that only nano-scale craft pushed by very high-power lasers could cross to the nearest star inside a working lifetime. So since 2012 Dresden has kept a dedicated breakthrough-propulsion group whose job is to test concepts that claim at least ten times more thrust for the same power, most of which work by modifying inertial mass. Two are under test: the EMDrive, microwaves fed into a truncated cone-shaped cavity, and the Mach-Effect Thruster, which is expected to produce a time-averaged force from mass fluctuations driven in a stack of piezoelectric crystals. Around both, the group is building thrust balances good enough to tell a real force from a laboratory artefact — which is the actual point of the programme.
Connection
This is the paper that puts a named university group, a funding line and a hardware plan behind the idea that thrust can come from modifying inertia rather than throwing mass overboard — chapter 8’s subject exactly. It also sets the standard chapter 1 asks for: measure the candidate and the artefact side by side, on instruments built to tell them apart.
From the source
Since 2012 a dedicated breakthrough propulsion physics group has been running at the Institute of Aerospace Engineering at TU Dresden, investigating concepts that claim to be at least an order of magnitude more efficient at producing thrust than a photon rocket. Most of the schemes it tests rely on modifying the inertial mass, which in turn could lead to a new propellantless propulsion method.Publisher’s abstract, sentences three and four
The group’s stated intention is to develop research infrastructure that can test new ideas and measure thrusts or artefacts with high confidence, so as to determine whether a concept works and, if it does, how to scale it up. That is a deliberate reordering of the usual priority: the instrument comes before the result.Publisher’s abstract, sentence five
The first concept under test is the EMDrive, which feeds microwaves into a truncated cone-shaped cavity and is claimed to produce thrust. The authors note that it is not clear on which theoretical basis this can work, but that several experimental tests have been reported in the literature, which warrants a closer examination. Dresden is building several models of different sizes to understand scaling laws and the interaction with the test environment.Publisher’s abstract, sentences six to eight
The second concept is the Mach-Effect Thruster, which the authors describe as theoretically much better understood: it is believed to generate mass fluctuations in a piezo-crystal stack that create non-zero time-averaged thrusts. Alongside theoretical models the group is testing and building several such thrusters in novel setups to investigate their thrust capability further.Publisher’s abstract, sentences nine and ten
Several cutting-edge thrust balances are under development so that thrust measurements can be compared across different measurement setups, both to gain confidence and to identify experimental artefacts. Running the same article on more than one balance is the design decision that lets a null result count for as much as a positive one.Publisher’s abstract, final sentence
What to watch: whether either device produces a force that survives the instrument. The programme also runs side-experiments into other experimental areas that may be promising for revolutionary propulsion, so the same balances serve more than the two headline concepts. The measurements that answer the question are the ones the group published next, on a purpose-built balance with the thruster reversed and the power chain instrumented.Publisher’s abstract, sentence eleven; companion paper, Acta Astronautica 161, pages 139 to 152
The way in
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actaastro.2018.10.028How to cite it
Martin Tajmar, Matthias Kößling, Marcel Weikert, Maxime Monette (2018) The SpaceDrive project – Developing revolutionary propulsion at TU Dresden doi:10.1016/j.actaastro.2018.10.028