Impulse Engine

What Makes It Go

How to lose weight without throwing away the ship
– or the passengers

Rockets must lose 90 percent of their weight in fuel just to thrust the ship into orbit. Sometimes they lose human life. Are there other ways to do this without the waste and risk? Dean built a centrifugal force engine that lost 5% of its weight while running on a floor scale.[11] According to many physicists, even that slight weight loss would have been enough to have made us a space-faring race. So why aren’t we walking on the Moon and Mars today thriving with an interplanetary economy?

Sadly for Dean and the rest of us the political atmosphere of the 1950s, and resistance from the scientific community enchanted with the fireworks of rocket propulsion, grounded the Dean Drive.[12]

The Reciprocating Impulse Drive (RID)

Inertial propulsion engine E-8 is a two-cycle, 10 Hz reciprocating impulse drive (RID). It weighs 40 lbs and loses over 27 lbs while running on a floor scale (two different brand-name bath scales) without ejecting mass - using just 160 watts of power. This is a steady weight loss, not a bouncing scale or resonating dial effect, from a dependable centrifugal force engine that will not fly apart. Though my earlier inertial propulsion prototypes run horizontally using “stick-slip” (friction as a back-stop) because they are single-cycle units (E-4 and E-6), a multiple-cycle unit like RID can overcome its inertia vertically because there is no time for “slip”. Also, in-line spring-loaded floor scales have no “stick” to them. To top it off, this engine has built-in acceleration detectors that unmistakably display continuous thrust on the front panel. Dust particles on the top-plate dance so fast, they clearly float above the engine from the centrifugal force of its whirling “elliptics”.

Unlike prior art this drive is lightweight and has no complicated moving parts to quickly wear-out and break, nor requires regular lubrication. It runs on man’s most convenient form of power – electricity so it is clean and quiet. Because RID’s internal forces align with the direction of travel it’s resilient and dependable.

This impulse engine is composed of two carriages that are suspended by springs on the four rods of a mainframe in-line with a control platform. Each carriage holds two counter-spinning eccentric rotors of solid brass weighing 2 lbs each with a 1.5” radius and spin at 300 RPM. This equates to 5 Hz frequency for each carriage which reciprocates, giving a total engine frequency of 10 Hz (cps). The direction of rectified force is upwards within the mainframe.

The Pendulum Test 2009

Like all engines, if the load is not properly placed, efficiency declines. The load of gravity on the engine's carriages (as weight) in the vertical acts differently than when running horizontally because the carriages are now weightless. We are working on making the adjustments to compensate for this load change and - for the easy transition between these load changes.

In May 2009 I installed Revision 6 to allow the engine to gain more ground across the zenith board. See below. The time available to me to work on this drive is limited, but in the summer of 2011 I will modify the drive again so that it may carry (not drag) - a load horizontally on frictionless roller bearing wheels and will publish the results on this site.

	E-8 Pendulum Test – June 2009 Inertial Engine E-8 hanging from four 76-inch long, 75 lb-test steel chains. Reference board is propped-up behind engine and not in contact with machine. Engine frequency while running on its side is 13 - 14 Hz.
Engine E-8 hanging at rest with its base-plate bottom edge aligned with thick black line on reference board.	Engine running and steadily deflecting from zenith 1-inch plus. Bottom carriage is now providing thrust.	Top carriage is now providing thrust. For reference, the engine base-plate is 3/4-inch thick.
Bottom carriage is about to provide thrust. Note engine is still deflected from zenith - inertial delay at work.	Top carriage is providing thrust.	Both carriages are in transition and engine is still deflected from zenith. Photographed with Kodak DZ1012 IS at 10 mega pixel resolution

Electric Satellite Engine

Because satellite orbits decay and sometimes need to be moved about, they require large tanks of retro jet propellant or dangerous nuclear batteries. This means extra weight, space, and limited life. As such, there is an open market for an efficient, electric satellite engine. The required impulse drive doesn’t have to become totally weightless on the ground but it should lose substantial weight while running. RID is a working prototype of such a drive.

The RID’s steady weight-loss equates to about 70% of the engines’ weight and would be like a 185 lb man in orbit suddenly reducing his weight to 55 lbs; he would be shot through space with 130 lbs of thrust. In this case, the engine would propel itself and anything attached to it with 27 plus lbs of thrust.[13] But this is more than enough force to maneuver a two-ton satellite in orbit. Mounted in a 360-degree gimble and guided by a radio-controlled joystick this engine could place an orbiting satellite anywhere – even into deep space and beyond – using solar or nuclear power. Since this drive functions with five separate inertial frames (it has two carriages) it’s exceptionally efficient at 160 watts avg. or just 1/5th hp.

Mission to Mars

The RID was designed to lose weight only and impel payload already in orbit. However, from the Moon’s surface RID would lift-off and attain orbit with 20 lbs of thrust because the Moon’s gravity is one-sixth g. Though the weight of the engine and its rotors are reduced, the rotor's inertial mass are not and provides the same force as on Earth (a dumbbell in space has the same intractance as it does on Earth but without the weight). From the surface of Mars RID would lift-off with 12 lbs of thrust, Mar’s gravity being about one-third g.

Mars’ orbit swings it close to Earth once every two earth-years where there is a 6-month window of space travel. With conventional rocket powered spacecraft a manned trip to the red planet would take the full 6 months, then a 12-month wait for the orbits to conjunct again, then another 6-month trip back home to Earth.

Eight RID engines (8 E-8’s) ganged together in free space could safely thrust humans to Mars within a month at a fraction of the cost of dangerous rockets. Once activated, in a short period of time, the spacecraft would impel smoothly to a very high rate of speed. To slow and brake the craft, the 16-cycle engine would simply be turned 180º then reactivated – all mounted safely inside the ship for ease of maintenance and omni-directional control.

A	B
E-8 weighing 40 lbs	E-8 weighing 13 lbs
Out-Running Gravity
A. Engine at rest and loosely tethered RID on standby weighs 40 lbs and adaptor table weighs 9 lbs totaling 49 lbs. Note position of brass rod-rotors and spacing between the carriages.
B. Engine is running with carriages desynchronized (180°out of phase with each other, or normal phasing) producing a steady weight loss of over 27 lbs, the scale resolving at under 22 lbs. Note brass rod-rotor’s position relative to carriages (also with engine off, these heavy rotors would normally drop and not rest horizontally). Unfortunately camera flash overwhelms the LED indicators on the control panel. Photographed with Kodak 200 speed film.

Slingshot to Saucercraft

Shortly after the dawn of man – long before we invented the wheel – we harnessed the centrifugal force of the rotary slingshot. Since then there’ve been no further developments of the potential energy that physics terms “angular momentum”. It has remained locked up in rotary motion. Hold a spinning gyroscope and twist it perpendicular to its plane of rotation and you’ll feel a delayed but powerful reactive force between its two inertial frames. This is the potential that is temporality stored in angular momentum. But in gyroscopes and flywheels this potential is spread evenly about the rotor’s orbit.

Eccentric rotors, on the other hand, do not have a smooth, even angular momentum so can be configured into oscillatory motion whereby surge can manifest along the plane of rotation. Then, by shifting this two-frame oscillator complex within its third-frame housing to increase the CAT, angular momentum can become kinetic and the rotor’s centrifugal force is no longer balanced by a centripetal. For a brief moment in an eccentric rotors’ cycle, these two opposing forces are separated and a powerful burst of energy is efficiently released at the expense of electricity. One day soon – like the horse and buggy – tires, roads and bridges will be remnants of the past, thanks to Norman L. Dean's inertial propulsion drive.

Steven M. Hampton
Chief Engineer
Centrifugål Dynamics Co.
email: Thrust@frontiernet.net

Endnotes / Bibliography

[11] John W. Campbell, Jr., The Space Drive Problem, Astounding Science Fact and Fiction, June 1960, pg 98.
[12] John W. Campbell, Jr., That Fourth Law of Motion, Analog, May 1962, pgs 4 -6, 177.
[13] Like any other form of propulsion, inertial engines need a load or enough mass to stabilize the mainframe of the drive. In the case with RID’s weight loss demonstration gravity is the load. In space it would be the inertial mass of the satellite or spacecraft that would provide the load.

Photographs and drawings by Steven Hampton © 2007, 2011