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by qubex
3114 days ago
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Magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) is a real branch of physics that deals with the motion of charged fluids (which could be ions dispersed in a fluid, but more typically involve the high-temperature plasmas of stars and experimental fusion reactors). Mathematically it fuses Maxwell’s Laws of Electromagnetism with Navier-Stokes for fluid flow (if that is insufficiently nauseating, relativistic and quantised complications are available upon request). The idea of moving water by running a current through it and subjecting it to magnetic fields was “diffusely known” in the late 1970s/early 1980s. Japanese researchers eventually built such a device in the 1990s and discovered it to be hideously inefficient. I myself knocked together a means of getting electricity out of a flame by means of electrodes and a magnetic field as a high-school science in the late 1990s. It really isn't as exotic as it sounds. Tom Clancy isn’t actually who conceived of MHD propulsion for the fictional Red October: in his book, the boat made use of an impeller (essentially a propeller, perhaps contra-rotating, inside a cowling much a kin to a jet engine nacelle). It was only revised to be a MHD system for the film. Interestingly, impellers have now become mainstream methods of propelling a submarine, and it seems that the next frontier is to use brushless engine designs to drive the rotor by oscillating magnetic fields generated by housed coils and not need to run an axle through the pressure hull. MHD meanwhile, as you can see, has been relegated to a supporting role of perhaps aiding stealth. So, remarkably, Clancy was entirely accurate in his technological predictions and the later film-makers screwed up. |
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