If there's one thing science fiction movies and TV shows have taught us about the future of air travel, it's that fossil fuel-burning aircraft will eventually be relics of the past. That's probably a good thing, as fossil fuels aren't great for the environment, but what will replace them?
We have already seen electric aircraft that use a battery to spin the propellers, but it's pretty old school, at least compared to what a team of scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has built. In an article published on Nature , the researchers describe how they conceptualized and then built a small-scale version of an aircraft that uses ion propulsion to allow movement… without moving parts. And I must say that I really like the possibility of seeing ion engines acting as air propulsion.
What is ion propulsion, and how did they do it at MIT?
How did MIT scientists manage to fly a plane without fuel or propellers? How does the ion thruster work? Forget about Star Trek: it's actually a fairly simple concept, to the point that even I understood it. Of course, understanding how to put it into practice took some time.
When air is ionized it receives an electrical charge. Since charged air particles are attracted to whatever the opposite charge is, be it positive or negative, it is possible for a system to actually move air on a wing with nothing more than an electrical charge and cleverly placed wires carrying a positive or negative charge of, say, 20.000 volts. The electric field that is created causes the air to move rapidly over the wings in the same way as it would if the plane were pushed by jet engines or pulled by propellers.
The result is ion propulsion: a silent electric propulsion system that should, in theory, be incredibly reliable.
Why can the ion engine change the rules of the game?
At the moment the airline industry he's in big, big trouble. It had been struggling for years with the decrease in the number of air travellers, and today the pandemic has truly brought every airline in the world to its knees. When it came to picking up a new plane, airlines focused primarily on comfort. The companies' workhorse is a decades-old form of jet that travels back and forth around the world burning a sea of fuel.
