Author: Administrator

We just finished firing test 47. This was the second test of the new Hall effect unit. We made some modifications and got a 310% increase in power output. We’re starting to figure this out.

We successfully generated power with the Hall effect MHD generator. Has anyone else done this outside of a national lab? This unit still needs a lot of tweaking, but I’m pretty happy with the results of the first run.

This was MHD test firing number 46.

Our MHD development is now going to split into three branches. The first is the using the #45 unit on the quad engine. In the second we using our older narrow channel unit for using in developing a new data logger. In the third branch we starting work on the more complex Hall effect type MHD generator.

The electrode array for the Hall effect MHD Generator.

Compare Tandem’s balloon at 20,000 feet with it at 95,085 feet.

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Saturday the team inflated a five foot diameter,seventeen foot long Dark Sky Station arm. The test went really well. From what we learned we’ve made several modification to the arm ends. If it works we can pull twenty pounds out of the vehicle.

We conducted two more MHD generator firing tests. Carbon plate erosion was pretty bad. No enough to cause a problem on this scale but enough that it might be on the quad engine. Doubling the plates was an easy fix but now we needed to get a new baseline in the data. The first test did just that and the data is below. The anode and cathode get ready fouled with the test motors were using. We clean them between firings on the assumption that dirty electrical probes will hurt power production.  To test that firing test 45 was done without cleaning. Power dropped off by about 3/4.  This won’t be as big of a problem with the quad engine as it should run a lot cleaner.

MHD Test 44

In last night’s test we were looking at current under load.

We’re also honing the configuration for the MHD that will go in the quad engine.

Here’s a making of video of the Samsung project. It has cool scenes from the Japanese side of the project that I’ve never scene before. It also has great recovery footage.

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Samsung has been posting some great videos of the Galaxy phone project we did for them last July.

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