The thing does fly. It is weird stuff. I don't know that I'd call it electrogravity, myself. I like ion propulsion better. Standing next to the thing, it throws off a good breeze and you can smell ozone it's making. The way it takes off is unusual. It kind of rocks back and forth, then floats up, but not like it was sitting over a fan or anything.
It works in oil, it works in a sealed plastic bag. I've got to try that to see what I feel, because when this think is floating, you can feel the "exhuaust" of the surrounding airIonic wind is collecting ions from the wind and putting them to work, like a windmill does except no. There is no wind in this experiement.
http://foldedspace.com/corporate.html:
Gravitec has been dedicated to the research and development of a new propulsion technology known as "Electric Field Propulsion". Simply stated, Field propulsion is the single most revolutionary propulsion break through in history.
The basis for this claim comes from the apparent ability of the underlying phenomenon to generate a propulsive force without the need to exhaust a gas or other fluid in the opposite direction to achieve thrust. Field Propulsion appears to simply need a non-uniform electric field around a mass to generate a propulsive force.
This means that field propulsion does not require fuel in the same way jets or rockets do today. It only requires electric power to convert it into a propulsive force.
See
http://jnaudin.free.fr/html/lifters.htm for an explanation of the technology.
The Lifter is not a simple ionic wind device as Seversky's Ionocraft or as the Hagen's Flying apparatus. The Lifter uses a special asymmetrical capacitor geometry to produce an asymmetrical flow of EM energy around itself. The Biefeld-Brown Effect has been tested successfully in vacuum at 10e-5 torr by the Purdue University - Energy Conversion Lab with accurate and deep measurements in Sep 2000. These tests have fully demonstrated that the ionic wind is not the source of the main thrust....
More than 100 Lifter replications have been done successfully by many experimenters and physicists Worldwide ( see The Worldwide Lifters replications logbook ). Jim Hinsch, #104:
http://jnaudin.free.fr/html/lfreplog.htm
Press Release:
http://technology.nasa.gov/scripts/nls_ax.dll/twDispTOPSItem(111;TOP8-80;0;1)
Nasa demos the affect:
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http://jnaudin.free.fr/html/2dacap.htm
On November 13, 2001, the NASA patent US 6,317,310 " Apparatus and Method for generating a thrust using a two dimensional asymmetrical capacitor module " has been granted.
Go back and look at the links. It's a demonstration of the Biefeld-Brown affect. The same affect that causes a downed high-voltage power line to dance around on the ground.
High voltage causes the space between the top wire an the foil base to become charged, much like a capacitor. This device is essentially a leaky capacitor. The difference in surface areas between the two sides of the capacitor causes most of the leakage to occur at the surface of the aluminum foil, which leak off horizontally. The resut is ions moving downward to restablish the charge. Evey action has an equal and opposite reaction. The reaction to ions flowing downward is thrust upward.
Hillbilly: The instructions can be found at
http://jnaudin.free.fr/html/lftbld.htm but they aren't hard and fast. My design used fewer materials and was a bit easier, but is more fragile. See lifter demo #100, done by a 13 year old student :
I am a 13 year old student in Mr. Demperio's Physics class. Mr. D believes I am the youngest experimenter to build a lifter 1.
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After several attempts I had success with my first lifter flight on Friday 10/5/02 at 9 am. I used 1mm X 4mm balsa for the frame and the emitter wire is .002
stainless steel wire at 3.5cm from the foil collector.
My power supply is an old monitor that Mr.D set up for me. I followed Mr. Demperio's instructions but decided to replace the foam frame with balsa cut from a large sheet so I wouldn't be copying the ones he built. I am also working on a square one that is larger.
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Outdoors test, angled for forward propulsion:
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