is there a way to make ion thrusters work in the atmosphere to

>>8823397
No, because we don't need to as we have the fucking atmosphere we can suck as intake, accelerate and mix to burn our fuel and exhaust that motherfucker at very high speed => thrust.
Why bother then ?

>>8823419
i figured ion thrusters would be capable of higher specific impulse which would make them more fuel efficient, allowing long-duration trips for recon or in atmosphere satellite shit. im just spitballing but i think that it would lead to interesting drone tech if it were ever possible without burning the RF frame into dust.

>>8823429
Ion thrusters are too weak for the friction of our atmosphere. Their benefit take place only in space where you can't throw mass out of your ass ad vitam eternam so you better off make literally every atom count.
Also they are built in a way so they can only work in a vacuum anyway.

>>8823397

Ion thrusters are comparatively efficient to modern high-bypass turbofan jet engines, in terms of effective specific impulse, but the specific power of jet engines far exceeds that of ion drives.

A jet engine has all the energy it needs to operate stored in the chemical bonds of its fuel, namely kerosene. It uses a free oxidizer in the form of atmospheric oxygen, as well as free reaction mass in the form of the atmosphere itself, in order to achieve an effective exhaust velocity of over 10,000 seconds.

An ion engine uses electricity generated by some outside means (solar panels, radio-thermal isotope generator, etc) to ionize a propellant and electrostatically accelerate the ions to very high speeds before de-ionizing them with an electron gun, which prevents electron buildup and stops the ions from simply being attracted back towards the negatively charged probe. An ion drive requires a lot of energy for a small amount of thrust, but even with an unlimited amount of power there is a theoretical limit to the number of ions that can be in the thrust chamber at any one time, and long before that limit is reached the engine itself would melt from the huge electric currents involved. The highest Isp of a flown ion drive is around 6000 seconds, but experimental high-energy ion drives have achieved as much as 19,300 seconds.

In short, Ion engines won't work on planes because the thrust is far too weak and can't be made much stronger because of physical limitations of the technology, even if they were more efficient and did work in atmosphere you wouldn't want to use them because they would require an external power source providing megawatts of energy in order to match the performance of a jet engine, and they aren't even that much more efficient than jet engines anyway. Jet engines don't work in space because there's no free reaction mass to increase the effective specific impulse of the engine.

>>8824590
>Posts this
>Thread gets deleted
Just imagine

>>8823429
or you could just use an electrically driven propeller

You realize that ion thrusters have micronewtons of thrust, right?

~0.001N of thrust is ~.0002 pounds of thrust. The engine of your average Cessna 172 creates approximately 350 pounds of thrust.

So, it's a stupid fucking idea unless someone figures out how to raise the thrust output of them by 6 orders of magnitude.

>>8823397
Yes, they're called ionocraft and they are completely useless.

>>8824634
Not quite exact, they have .. about 0.25N worth of thrust for a ~10kg engine.
Okay it's basically a continuous fart but not just a pinch of micronewtons either.

>>8824634
>>8825164
And i forgot to add, you may have seen some numbers in mN which are millinewtons and not micronewtons (mN vs µN)

>>8824590
nuclear reactors on planes then.
most dangerous craft ever

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nM2u2FDWsQ