My Hypothesis On How A Emdrive Works.

[TheSoloPlayer]

 So here is my hypothesis:

 

   Plasma is an unstable state of matter with strong electromagnetic properties. Plasma is easily pushed around in a fast manner by electromagnetism. When the plasma passes the electromagnets it switches electromagnetic poles, jetting out high velocity plasma.

 

 Mind you that this is only a hypothesis and not a full on theory or fact.

[CraigD]

SoloPlayer, I think you’re talking about the “EMDrive” microwave resonant cavity that Roger Sawyer and others propose can be used to produce thrust without expelling reaction mass. (its Wikipedia page, Sawyer’s company homepage) It and variants are also known as the “relativity drive” or “Q (as in quantum vacuum) thruster”. We discussed it (about 50 posts) starting back in 2006, in this thread.

 

Plasma is an unstable state of matter with strong electromagnetic properties. Plasma is easily pushed around in a fast manner by electromagnetism. When the plasma passes the electromagnets it switches electromagnetic poles, jetting out high velocity plasma.

You seem to be describing an ordinary ion thruster. These real-world devices are used to push present day Earth satellites and more far-traveling spacecraft by accelerating the heavier charged particles in plasmas – the atomic nuclei, vs the electrons – using either electromagnets or charged grids. How they work is very well-understood.

 

The EMDrive and variants don’t jet out ions (or presumably anything else), so I don’t think your hypothesis can apply to them.

 

Because several good physicists have dismissed Sawyer’s and others’ hypotheses explaining how his device could produce thrust, it would be easy to dismiss it as a crank invention, were it not for the fact that it does produce thrust when experimentally tested. When our last discussion of Sawyer’s device wound down in 2008, my best guess was that, like a lifter, the device’s thrust was due to unaccounted interaction with the air around the device, and that when one was tested in a vacuum chamber, the effect would vanish. Catching up on my reading to reply to this thread, however, I came across this April 2015 space news article reporting that in July 2014 NASA JSC’s Sonny White tested their EMDrive in a vacuum (also mentioned in this Wikipedia article section). They still measure a thrust!

 

Although the thrust was small (about 0.00005 N) and the thrust/power (0.000001 N/W) about 1/40th than of an ion thruster (for example, the NSTAR engine flown on Deep Space 1 and Dawn), these are not impractically low, and some believe they can be much increased. If so, the EMDrive may be the best motor for spacecraft in the near term, better than an ion engine can ever be.

 

If this proves so, physicists and engineers will find themselves in a situation that been rare for a long time, making practical use of a physical phenomenon they don’t fundamentally understand.