MIT engineers built an airplane that flies without any moving parts

inspiration from Star Trek

as a kid, steven barrett, an associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT, would watch the movie and tv series ‘star trek’ during his free time. his young eyes would gaze upon the shuttle crafts, so futuristic and dystopian that they would glide through the horizon at a lightning speed. barrett noticed how these space crafts seemed frameless, bare of their moving parts such as the propellers, and noiseless. such an observation still influences him today to the extent that he thinks, in the long-term future, planes should be stripped of their turbines and propellers to be more like the shuttle crafts of ‘star trek’ in their glowing light. at MIT, the professor did just that.

MIT engineers, led by barrett, have introduced the world’s first plan without moving parts, bare from any propellers and turbines. the lightweight aircraft relies on an ‘ionic wind’, or the abundant flow of ions produced aboard the plane that generates enough force to thrust the plane over a steady and sustained flight. through this concept and design, the plane ditches the use of fossil fuels, an element that adds to its silent glide.

image by christine y. he

going through the design

as the professor spoke to the university’s official news site, he describes how the plane is the first-ever sustained flight with no moving parts in the propulsion system. ‘this has potentially opened new and unexplored possibilities for aircraft which are quieter, mechanically simpler, and do not emit combustion emissions.’ the design weighs about five pounds and has a five-meter wingspan attached to thin wires resembling fences. these wires act as positively charged electrodes, while similarly arranged thicker wires, running along the back end of the plane’s wing, serve as negative electrodes.

the fuselage of the plane holds a stack of lithium-polymer batteries. barrett’s ion plane team included members of professor david perreault’s power electronics research group in the research laboratory of electronics, who designed a power supply that would convert the batteries’ output to a sufficiently high voltage to propel the plane. in this way, the batteries supply electricity at 40,000 volts to positively charge the wires via a lightweight power converter.

all other images courtesy of nature video

ionic wind as the core

around nine years ago, barrett started looking into designing a propulsion system for planes with no moving parts. he came up with ‘ionic wind’ – also known as electroaerodynamic thrust — a physical principle that describes a wind, or thrust, that can be produced when a current is passed between a thin and a thick electrode. if enough voltage is applied, the air in between the electrodes can produce enough thrust to propel a small aircraft, but it was largely assumed that it would be impossible to produce enough ionic wind to propel a larger aircraft over a sustained flight.

the team, which also included lincoln laboratory staff thomas sebastian and mark woolston, flew the plane in multiple test flights across the gymnasium in MIT’s dupont athletic center where the plane flew a distance of 60 meters – the maximum distance of the gym – and witnessed that the plane produced enough ionic thrust to sustain flight the entire time. they repeated the flight 10 times with similar performance and results.

the sketch of the airplane