Greetings,
I was reading through A.D. Moore's seminal work "Electrostatics" and on page 144 found his description of Harold C. Early's electrostatic gun for simulating micrometeoroid strikes. After a few elementary calculations based on what Moore wrote, I found it interesting and there is nothing readily available about it in the literature. Harold C. Early was indeed a researcher at University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and there are internet available archived research papers available on electrostatics and coronal discharge, but nothing about this item in particular.
Has anyone heard of this or have knowledge of it?
I do find electrostatics and electret generators for space propulsion and other applications to be historically neglected, and with advances in electret and related material science think it's time to develop applications that favor the use of electret generators for their superior power to weight ratio in instances where high voltage, low current is needed. For example, in flight. It makes no sense to have heavy magnetic generators, rectifiers, and DC to DC converters for atmospheric ionic drives, but electret generators (powered by admittedly a microjet turbine) could be practical.
I met such a problem with a satellite equipment. It is ionization, and it does not necessarily require high energy. The temperature in the ionized volume of gas can be as high as 10K°C, destroying plastic and metal films and seriously damaging equipment. Any high-energy particle will do it independently of nature - electrostatic, RX rays, nuclear, etc. I practically did it with voltages of about 12 - 24 V and very small currents, sometimes below 1 A.
This is very intetesting to me! Thanks for respnding. I found more recent articles after a day of searching and reading. I noticed the energy required was surprisingly lower than one would have thought, and then found recent experiments where projectiles had exit velocities of 4 km/s, and without combustion! My next thoughts were of how something electrically charged could be used as a supplemental propulsion device on long manned missions, with all the “high tech space trash” of mylar, aluminum and similar substances it will entail. Using some spare electrical energy, and possibly expelling it out the back of the spacecraft at high velocities sounds interesting.
It may be very interesting from a scientific point of view. But in practice, high-energy particles are very dangerous and will destroy everything on their way.
That's true, but considering the relatively low power requirements, and velocities that can be obtained, and the inherent dangers of space propulsion and rockets to begin with, I can see exploring practical applications like supplemental propulsion using essentially surplus power and "space trash" such as aluminum foil, mylar, and other aspects of waste that can be calculated to have consistent production rates on spacecraft. Maybe it's worth writing a paper and doing some elementary equations on.
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