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Concept
Magnetic field oscillating amplified thruster
Summary
The magnetic field oscillating amplified thruster (MOA; often named as plasma engine by the media) is a versatile electrothermodynamic system, which is able to accelerate nearly every electrically charged gaseous medium (plasma application) to extremely high velocities, thereby generating a high energetic plasma jet in the exhaust and also electrical conductive fluids (hydrodynamic application) in general.
To do so, MOA utilizes a so-called Alfvén wave, a physical principle within magnetohydrodynamics that was described first in 1942 by the later Nobel Prize winner Hannes Alfvén and which states that fluctuating magnetic fields can induce density waves in electric conductive media (e.g., plasma, salty water, etc.). These density waves can reach very high velocities and as the particles inside the medium are coupled to them, the particles are as well accelerated to very high velocities, accordingly reaching very high kinetic energies.
Due to the heating mechanism based on adiabatic compression, MOA is fundamentally different from other electrothermal thrusters, especially from the magnetoplasmadynamic or MPD thruster with which it is sometimes compared by the collective term of a plasma engine.
Because of the high exhaust velocities and the associated high specific impulse and/or the high particle energy, two prime application areas emerge: spaceflight and coating of particular materials. For the spaceflight case, the high specific impulse leads to a relevant reduction in propellant consumption (up to 90%) when comparing MOA to current state-of-the-art ion engines. For the coating case, the high kinetic energy of the exhaust particles leads to a high penetration depth within the target material. This allows for example to harden steel, aluminum and other metals, but also to change the material properties of glass and plastics.
An additional advantage of the MOA concept is its corrosion free behaviour, leading to a long lifetime of the system.
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