Ion Engine in atmosphere?

[Gerdih]

Neglecting the necessity of a power plant. What is the inconvenience of an ion thruster working in atmosphere? Is the presence of air a inconvenience?

 

[Urwumpe]

Neglecting the necessity of a power plant. What is the inconvenience of an ion thruster working in atmosphere? Is the presence of air a inconvenience?

It is once the air pressure exceeds the pressure by the accelerated gas. Air isn't easily ionized.

 

[Gerdih]

How would this be solved? A method to give a low pressure to the surrounded area of the exhaust outlet to give time to the engine to rise the pressure? It would be practical solving the problems with interaction with the atmosphere?

 

[boogabooga]

Or that the thrust of the typical ion engine will be well less than the atmospheric drag at any useful speed.

 

[Artlav]

Would it even work?
It's an electric particle accelerator - the ions won't even get as far as the nets with air being there, or fail to accelerate sufficiently.

Did anyone actually tried to run one in the air?

There is a similar concept to ion engine that do work in the air, it's like a jet engine compared to rocket engine for electric propulsion, afaik:

 

[Keatah]

How would this be solved? A method to give a low pressure to the surrounded area of the exhaust outlet to give time to the engine to rise the pressure? It would be practical solving the problems with interaction with the atmosphere?

Keeping a vacuum around the nozzle and chamber area - as you just suggested - would be quite an impracticality in and of itself. The amount of energy expended would be similar to a chemical rocket.

 

[Hartmann]

Neglecting the necessity of a power plant. What is the inconvenience of an ion thruster working in atmosphere? Is the presence of air a inconvenience?

It would be very impractical in terms of weight, drag and thrust. it only works well in vacuum.

 

[mhutiubih]

It's hard to say that it is an inconvenience but rather it is that using fossil fuels is much much much more cost efficient.

If we really wanted to use electric propulsion inside the atmosphere it would not be too much of a problem past safety issues. It would work just fine as long as we are using electrothermal propulsion or something powerful.

So maybe your now wondering, "it is worth it to sacrifice money to eliminate pollution," but the fact is that using electric propulsion doesn't eliminate pollution it just hides it. You have to look at the total process of making flight possible..... so lets say we had an electric propulsion system on a plane...... so where does it pull its juice from..... a power soucre right, like a rechargable battery........ well how do we charge a battery....... using an electrical outlet, and where does the electricity come from........ power plants that use fossil fuels to create electricity. So that's why - for the most part - we don't use electric propulsion systems in the atmosphere.

It's just too costly and doesn't really eliminate any problems.

But it would produce a nice ozone smell out the exhaust, if your brave enough to stand near it.