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[RyanDG]

http://www.businessinsider.com/boei...wered-by-lasers-and-nuclear-explosions-2015-7

Last week, the US Patent and Trademark Office approved an application from Boeing's Robert Budica, James Herzberg, and Frank Chandler for a laser- and nuclear-driven airplane engine.
With airplane makers constantly on the lookout for new and more efficient ways to power their products, this laser engine is the latest idea cooked up by the engineers at Boeing.

Modern airliners such as the Boeing Dreamliner are powered by multiple turbofan engines. These engines deploy a series of fans and turbines to compress air and ignite fuel to produce thrust.

Boeing's newly patented engine provides thrust in a very different and rather novel manner. According to the patent filing, the laser engine may also be used to power rockets, missiles, and even spacecraft.

As of now, the engine lives only in patent documents. The technology is so out-there that it is unclear whether anyone will ever build it.

Here's how Boeing's new patented engine works:

Just had this come across my email and found it interesting.

I've always been fascinated with nuclear powered airplanes in theory. One of my favorite sites to hike locally is a former research facility where Lockheed Martin and the US government was testing an open air reactor (for potential use in an experimental aircraft).

I also saw an interesting documentary (this is worth a watch if you have 45 minutes to burn) about liquid salt reactors that was kind of interesting, highlighting the potential use of Thorium as a safer alternative to other nuclear fuel in aircraft such as this.

Another article brought up the connection to an old idea to power a star ship...

http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=25588

When young Rod Hyde, fresh out of MIT, started working on starship design in mid-1972, there were not many fusion-based precedents for what he was up to. He had taken a summer job that would turn into a career at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, but right off the bat he was involved with Lowell Wood and John Nuckolls in a concept that would use a battery of lasers to create fusion reactions whose energy would be channeled out the back of the ship by magnetic nozzles. Wood and Nuckolls had been developing their ideas for years, after Nuckolls first began to ponder how to use laser fusion micro-explosions to drive a spacecraft.

 

[Kabouter]

Yesssssssss

 

[smurfx]

how can they patent this if they don't have a working prototype?

 

[DopeyFish]

how can they patent this if they don't have a working prototype?

welcome to the USPTO!

 

[smurfx]

welcome to the USPTO!

i'm going to patent an engine that works on antimatter! brb.

 

[ElTorro]

Hope that thing does not crash anywhere near me.

 

[Alphahawk]

i'm going to patent an engine that works on antimatter! brb.

Pretty sure the idea has to be at least somewhat feasible.

The patent office won't take any patents for a perpetual motion device, because science has proved that it's not possible, for instance.

 

[Log4Girlz]

Holy shit so my idea is feasible. I always wondered if this shit was possible.

 

[ThoseDeafMutes]

i'm going to patent an engine that works on antimatter! brb.

Pretty sure the idea has to be at least somewhat feasible.

The patent office won't take any patents for a perpetual motion device, because science has proved that it's not possible, for instance.

Antimatter engine would work fine, maybe not for an aircraft depending on the specifics but it's an ultra dense energy source and conceptually can be used for propulsion. The problem would be obtaining sufficient quantities of it for use, but I don't see why that would be an obstacle for a patent.

You would need to be pretty specific though, I don't think you'd just be able to go down and say "I patent the idea of any propulsion that uses antimatter!" You'd need a design.

 

[YourMaster]

Antimatter engine would work fine, maybe not for an aircraft depending on the specifics but it's an ultra dense energy source and conceptually can be used for propulsion. The problem would be obtaining sufficient quantities of it for use, but I don't see why that would be an obstacle for a patent.

You would need to be pretty specific though, I don't think you'd just be able to go down and say "I patent the idea of any propulsion that uses antimatter!" You'd need a design.

Please remember all the failed attempts at building dynamite engines. Surely getting the antimatter is 'a bit of a hurdle', but if I could give you enough of it to power a car/plane for a lifetime you'd be very hard pressed to make it work.
Your theories would have to involve some way to store the antimatter without blowing up, injecting the fuel, igniting it in such a dose that you get enough energy for propulsion without blowing up the engine, somehow actually transform the energy into propulsion, and than having the engine in such a state that you can repeat the whole process. If you want to fit it on a plane you'll have some further considerations, like the weight of the thing and not being able to use a river to cool it down.

 

[maomaoIYP]

It doesn't look to me that the idea is feasible at all.
For this to work you need less energy put into the lasers compared to the amount of energy given out by the fusion reaction. No one has figured out how to do this yet, every fusion reaction that has been done in a lab so far does not give out more energy than what is put in. If you've solved this "minor" problem you'd have created limitless energy.

 

[Dryk]

This is literally a patent for a working fusion reactor. The US patent office clearly doesn't know a thing about science because if they did they would be too busy laughing to grant this patent.

 

[androvsky]

This is literally a patent for a working fusion reactor. The US patent office clearly doesn't know a thing about science because if they did they would be too busy laughing to grant this patent.

Working fusion reactors are a dime a dozen. High school students have built them, and I believe one of the people running Fermilab had one on his desk.

The trick is getting more power out than you put in.

 

[ThoseDeafMutes]

Please remember all the failed attempts at building dynamite engines. Surely getting the antimatter is 'a bit of a hurdle', but if I could give you enough of it to power a car/plane for a lifetime you'd be very hard pressed to make it work.
Your theories would have to involve some way to store the antimatter without blowing up, injecting the fuel, igniting it in such a dose that you get enough energy for propulsion without blowing up the engine, somehow actually transform the energy into propulsion, and than having the engine in such a state that you can repeat the whole process. If you want to fit it on a plane you'll have some further considerations, like the weight of the thing and not being able to use a river to cool it down.

You would most likely be using some kind of antimatter initiated fusion power plant which spins a turbine. The conceptual groundwork has been laid by others already, as a method for initiating a fusion reaction in a bomb, and also in a power reactor, and also directly for nuclear pulsed propulsion. Actually the spacecraft in the movie Avatar was a "Valkyrie" antimatter starship as designed by Charles Pellegrino and Jim Powell in the 1990's (Cameron was in contact with Pellegrino as a consultant IIRC). With the travel time to alpha centauri in the film roughly matching the paper specs of that craft!

 

[Dryk]

Working fusion reactors are a dime a dozen. High school students have built them, and I believe one of the people running Fermilab had one on his desk.

The trick is getting more power out than you put in.

Well that's what I meant. Not only is it energy positive, it's producing positive power at a high enough rate to power the lasers and produce enough the 300-400kNf you need to get an airliner off the ground and it's smaller than the one Lockheed Skunkworks is proposing. This is probably a good area to explore for propulsion but it's so far away.

 

[JordanN]

Hope that thing does not crash anywhere near me.

Or if terrorists hijack it and use it as a weapon.

 

[dekline]

Who wants to be the next Chuck Yeager!

 

[Aikidoka]

Pretty sure the idea has to be at least somewhat feasible.

The patent office won't take any patents for a perpetual motion device, because science has proved that it's not possible, for instance.

The patent office is not supposed to accept patents for perpetual motion machines but they sometimes do (perhaps because the patent reviewer cannot figure out why it doesn't work according to Wikipedia). The US Patent Office has lots of flaws - I also recall someone successfully patenting the Wheel!


Anyways, NASA has been working on Fusion Driven Rockets for a few years now. Here is their page on it: http://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/niac/2012_phaseII_fellows_slough.html

They have already gotten some individual components of the engine built and functional, though I haven't really had an update on it in a while. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_pulse_propulsion#MSNW_Magneto-Inertial_Fusion_Driven_Rocket

Also contains info on Antimatter propulsion for those interested.

 

[Paskil]

Gotta line up the next money pit since the F-35 is wrapping up.

 

[jambo]

You would need to be pretty specific though, I don't think you'd just be able to go down and say "I patent the idea of any propulsion that uses antimatter!" You'd need a design.

 

[butzopower]

I see Frank Chandler is slowly making his way to Mars, Boone be damned.

 

[Poodlestrike]

It doesn't look to me that the idea is feasible at all.
For this to work you need less energy put into the lasers compared to the amount of energy given out by the fusion reaction. No one has figured out how to do this yet, every fusion reaction that has been done in a lab so far does not give out more energy than what is put in. If you've solved this "minor" problem you'd have created limitless energy.

Setting aside that they have figured out how to create more energy than they put in (though not in a sustainable reaction)...

Why would that be a requirement, again? This is propulsion, not power generation. It doesn't need to be self-sustaining.

 

[CrocMother]

Well three aeronautics engineers working for Boeing seem to think it's feasible enough for a patent, I'll take their word for it.

 

[Goro Majima]

Well you'd nuclear power to make something crazy like an Avengers helicarrier or something equally as ridiculous.

 

[maomaoIYP]

Setting aside that they have figured out how to create more energy than they put in (though not in a sustainable reaction)...

Why would that be a requirement, again? This is propulsion, not power generation. It doesn't need to be self-sustaining.

The fusion reaction needs to power: 1) the propulsion, 2) breeding of the U-238, 3) possibly breeding of the H-3 from Li-6, and 4) the lasers to cause the fusion reaction.

If step 4 alone cannot even generate more energy than what is put in, a combination of steps 1-4 will definitely use more energy than the fusion reaction can generate.