MSimon wrote:The capacitors have a rather strong temp coefficient (N4700) and a high dissipation factor above 1 MHz. This may cause confounding effects. If you could get them, NPO capacitors would be better - except that the capacitance per volume would be significantly lower.
I hope Paul March describes how he is going to handle the above.
I'd also be interested in his force/acceleration measurement set up.
One has to be extremely cautions because capacitance non-linear effects can generate harmonics that can be confused with the desired signal.
I have an MSc student who is building test kit for Mach effect that should give decent thrust (if M-E exists) and can be fully enclosed with batteries inside a double-wall container. This allows unidirectional thrust to be measured with no possibility of magnetic, vibrational or thermal effects compromising results.
The basic principle is to run Laplace force wires along the sides of the capacitors in a 0.5T magnetic field from permanent magnets.
Separating the acceleration and delta-E waveforms in this way has some advantages - not least because relative phase can be adjusted which will alter the M-E sign but keep almost all other effects identical. The two driving waveforms need to be different (harmonically related) frequencies to result in a unidirectional resultant force.
We should manage 30kHz with very high accelerations (limited by stuff breaking).
If this stuff really works (which I doubt) the optimal thruster would I think be a high energy density capacitor (probably film) with many embedded parallel wires carrying AC current separate from the capacitor current and which provide acceleration in the field from permanent magnets.
Best wishes, Tom
PS - if you go by Woodward's original equations our setup should just about be able to levitate - 1kg-f ~ weight of equipment). But these alas are now known not to be correct.