This new jet engine uses plasma. Plasma is the fourth state of ... years they may be able to scale-up the prototype to power small, pilotless airplanes or heavy-duty drones to carry cargo for ...

When [Jay Bowles] demoed his first-generation ion thruster on Plasma Channel ... more like a miniature jet engine than anything that had come before it. Optimizations would need to be made ...

A 1-kilogram steel ball can maintain flight as the plasma expands rapidly from the extremely hot ionization chamber environment. The thrust produced matches jet engine performance, which illustrates ...

The plasma jet is typically produced in two steps: pressuring a gas through a small nozzle hole and generating an electric arc via power supply. Remarkably, the introduced arc ionizes the gas ...