Anomalies in the Asymmetrical Capacitors for Propulsion Tests

[Bobbox1980]

I realize Biefeld Brown is a verboten topic on this forum but I believe the admins overlooked the anomalies sections in some NASA studies when coming to that decision.

In the http://gltrs.grc.nasa.gov/reports/2004/CR-2004-213312.pdf" tests, in the Observations section it states:

After several days of tests, we found that no device showed signs of rotation at a pressure less than 300 Torr, with one exception. When Device 2 wired according to Circuit A was placed in the chamber and immediately pumped down to a pressure of 5.5 × 10–5 Torr, something interesting happened. The voltage on it was increased to 44 kV, and through the viewing port a large arc was observed. At that same moment, the device was seen to move about an eighth of a rotation and stop.

The large arc that was observed suggests that this movement was most likely caused by
material being ejected from the device. This material might be either the copper on the plates or it might be water vapor. Each time the chamber was opened and then pumped down to a high vacuum, for a period of about thirty minutes the pump would frequently cycle on and off. We attributed this to water vapor and other impurities attaching themselves to all of our equipment in the chamber while it was open to the room environment. It may be significant that the large arc and slight movement occurred during the time these impurities were being removed. The amount of material that would be necessary to cause this slight one time movement would be hard to detect.

Ejection of material was the team's hypothesis but it was never proven. If the capacitor had been encased in a dielectric resin this would have prevented arcing and the experimenters could have seen if there was movement when the DC voltage was first applied.


In the http://foldedspace.com/Twenty%20First%20Century%20Propulsion%20Concepts%20Robert%20%20L.%20Talley%20Complete.zip" tests, in the anomalies section, it states:

Near the end of the experimental program, we briefly examined the force generation effects with pulsed fields, which had a peak voltage of 19kV. Tes Nos. 56, 59, 62, 68 and 69 were conducted in this manner, using pulse repetition rates of 10, 60, 150, 400 and 600 Hz. Generally, no motion opf the test devices was observed, except in Test No. 69 where a very small but detectable motion was seen. For an input voltage of 19 kV during this test, the apparent force was about 0.007 micro Newtons (which is just about the force measurement threshold of 0.002 micro Newtons) and is not considered significant).


In both the Asymmetrical Capacitors for Propulsion and the 21st Century Propulsion Concept tests movement in vacuum was seen, and only seen, when pulsed DC voltages were applied to the capacitor devices that had a physical solid dielectric material between the capacitor plates, likely Lexan in the first and Acrylic in the second.


This absolutely warrants further investigation, the door is not closed on the possibility that Biefeld Brown is more than ionized air.

I would suggest an experiment encasing 2 large capacitor plates in a dielectric resin thick and strong enough to resist putting more than 1 million volts DC, pulsed onto the capacitor between 10,000 and 100,000 times a second.


P.S. One study is old, the other study is fairly new, trying reading more than the summaries of a study next time you guys decide to ban a topic.

 

[Kurdt]

I don't think two experimental anomalies warrants much further discussion on this issue. Locked pending moderation.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Here is the way that I see it. First of all, any evidence for a genuine anomaly is very small. We have a number of studies that claim no effect was observed [see the closed topics list and links], or that observed effects are likely explained conventionally, and one from 1990 claiming a slight effect that is almost certainly not the Biefeld-Brown effect. For one, Biefeld and Brown claimed to observe the phenomenon with no arcing. This was specfically discounted in the 1990 paper cited.

As for the evidence for some anomaly other than the so-called Biefeld-Brown effect, the report is in the literature and appears to be othewise unsupported. So, in the interest of objectivity, we can leave this open to potential explanations grounded in known science, but not for discussion of new theories. If we find recently published papers in appropriate mainstream journals that support the claims found in this report, then it would qualify for discussion in the physics forum.

Again, we are treating this as slight evidence for an anomaly, but not for any so-called Biefeld-Brown effect.