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{{Infobox paper
| title = Electrokinetics as a Propellantless Propulsion Source
| url = [http://www.naturalphilosophy.org/pdf/abstracts/abstracts_6914.pdf Link to paper]
| author = [[Thomas F Valone]]
| keywords = [[electrogravitic]], [[electrogravity]], [[electrokinetc]], [[high voltage]], [[asymmetric capacitor]], [[gravitator]], [[dielectrics]], [[pulsed EMF]]
| published = 2012
| journal = [[Physics Procedia]]
| volume = 38
| num_pages = 12
| pages = 87-98
}}

'''Read the full paper''' [http://www.naturalphilosophy.org/pdf/abstracts/abstracts_6914.pdf here]

==Abstract==

This is a review of the worthwhile, innovative theories and concepts in electrogravitics and electrokinetics that could yield tremendous technological and economic dividends in both investment dollars and potential applications for future generations. Electrogravitics is most commonly associated with the 1918 work by Professor Nipher followed by the 1928 British patent #300,311 of T. Townsend Brown, the 1952 Special Inquiry File #24-185 of the Office of Naval Research into the &ldquo;Electro-Gravity Device of Townsend Brown&rdquo; and two widely circulated 1956 Aviation Studies Ltd. Reports on &ldquo;Electrogravitics Systems&rdquo; and &ldquo;The Gravitics Situation.&rdquo; By definition, electrogravitics historically has had a purported relationship to gravity or the object's mass, as well as the applied voltage. An analysis of the 90-year old science of electrogravitics (or electrogravity) necessarily includes an analysis of electrokinetics. Electrokinetics, on the other hand, is more commonly associated with many patents of T. Townsend Brown as well as Agnew Bahnson, starting with the 1960 US patent #2,949,550 entitled, &ldquo;Electrokinetic Apparatus.&rdquo; Electrokinetics, which often involves a capacitor and dielectric, has virtually no relationship that can be connected with mass or gravity. The Army Research Lab has recently issued a report on electrokinetics, analyzing the force on an asymmetric capacitor, while NASA has received three patents on the same design topic. To successfully describe and predict the purported motion in the direction of the positive terminal of the capacitor, it is desirable to use the classical electrokinetic field and force equations for the specific geometry involved. This initial review also suggests directions for further confirming measurements. This paper also reviews the published electrokinetic experiments by the Army Research Lab by Bahder and Fazi, California State University at Fullerton work by Woodward and Mahood, Erwin Saxl, and others.

==Overview==

Thomas Valone of the Integrity Research Institute presented this review at the 2012 Space, Propulsion and Energy Sciences International Forum. It is a survey rather than an experimental report: its purpose is to gather the scattered twentieth-century claims of thrust from high-voltage capacitors under one theoretical roof, and the roof it proposes is [[Oleg D Jefimenko|Oleg Jefimenko]]'s "electrokinetic field." Valone's central thesis is that the direction and the charge/discharge behaviour of the forces reported by T. Townsend Brown, Rudolf Zinsser, Erwin Saxl, James Woodward and several patented capacitor designs can all be predicted from one term of the classical solution of [[Maxwell's Equations|Maxwell's equations]] for the electric field &mdash; the term proportional to &part;'''J'''/&part;''t''.

Valone is careful, and unusually so for this literature, to separate two claims that are often conflated. ''Electrogravitics'' he defines as "electricity used to create a force that depends upon an object's mass, even as gravity does" &mdash; the force must scale linearly with mass. ''Electrokinetics'' involves a capacitor and a dielectric and "has virtually no relationship that can be connected with mass or gravity." He notes that Brown's later patents drop the electrogravitic language entirely, and that the Army Research Laboratory's Tom Bahder attributes the thrust of lightweight "lifters" to ion mobility in air. Where the mainstream account stops there &mdash; ion wind explains the lifter, and there is nothing further to explain &mdash; Valone holds that the heavy-mass, high-dielectric, pulsed devices are a different phenomenon, and that a classical field term already present in Maxwell's equations accounts for them.

==The argument==

===Zinsser and Brown===

Valone treats Rudolf Zinsser's "kinetobaric" device and Brown's 1929 gravitator as instances of one effect. Zinsser connected a pulse generator to two conductive plates immersed in water, delivering pulses of a few nanoseconds, and reported a force that ''persisted after the generator was switched off''; the high dielectric constant of water (about 80) was held to be essential. Valone reports Peschka's figure for Zinsser's performance as 6 newtons per watt, twenty times the 0.32 N/W attributed to Roy Thornson's Inertial Impulse Engine and, he stresses, hundreds of times a DC-9 jet engine's 0.016 N/W or 3 lb/hp.

The parallels with Brown he draws in detail: both worked with dielectrics between capacitor plates; both reported saturation, so that once the device was "charged" to "its gravitic capacity" further electrical input had no effect; both reported effects on plants and living things; both found the pulsed voltage rather than the steady voltage to be the active ingredient. Brown's own description of the timing is quoted &mdash; "less than five seconds is required for the test pendulum to reach the maximum amplitude of the swing, but from thirty to eighty seconds are required for it to return to zero."

===Saxl and Woodward===

Erwin Saxl's electrically charged torsion pendulum, over 100 kg and driven at &plusmn;5000 V, is cited for its 1964 ''Nature'' report of "unexpected phenomena": the positively charged pendulum had the longest period, with diurnal and seasonal variation and the largest effects during solar and lunar eclipses. Valone reads this as demonstrating "the basic principles of electrogravitics: high voltage and mass together will cause unbalanced forces to occur."

James Woodward's mass-fluctuation work is set alongside it. Woodward's prediction, from Sciama's formulation of [[Mach's Principle|Mach's principle]] within general relativity, is that "in the presence of energy flow, the inertial mass of an object may undergo sizable variations, changing as the 2nd time derivative of the energy." With barium titanate dielectrics and a 3 kV signal, Woodward and Cramer reported symmetrical mass fluctuations of the order of centigrams; the thrust from Woodward's "flux capacitor" transducers, using 0.01 &mu;F capacitors at around 50 kHz and under 3 kV, is at the micronewton level and scales as the square of the applied voltage. Valone observes that Woodward's apparatus is essentially Saxl's torsion pendulum combined with Brown's dielectric capacitors, differing in pulse timing and voltage.

===Jefimenko's electrokinetic field===

The theoretical core is Jefimenko's decomposition of the electric field into three causal terms, of which the third &mdash; proportional to the time derivative of the current density and directed along the current &mdash; is the "electrokinetic field" '''E'''<sub>k</sub>. Jefimenko describes it as the dragging force that moving electrons exert on neighbouring charges, and traces it to Faraday's 1831 observation of a momentary current in a parallel wire when a current is switched on and a reversed one when it is switched off. Valone stresses Jefimenko's causal reading: the electric field is linked back to charge and its motion, and '''E''' is ''not'' a causal consequence of &part;'''B'''/&part;''t'' but occurs simultaneously with it; induction is ''measured'' by, not ''caused'' by, a changing magnetic field. Lenz's law is carried by the minus sign, and the field exists only while the current is changing.

For a parallel-plate capacitor with plates of width ''w'' separated by ''x'' and carrying opposite alternating currents, Jefimenko obtains '''E'''<sub>k</sub> = &minus;&mu;<sub>0</sub>(''x''/''w'')(''dI''/''dt'') '''ĵ'''. Valone notes that this expression has no ''c''<sup>2</sup> in the denominator, which he takes to mean that parallel-plate geometry should give much larger forces than other geometries at the same ''dI''/''dt'', and that a magnetically permeable dielectric would raise it further by replacing &mu;<sub>0</sub> with &mu;.

===Direction as the test===

Valone's proposed check is direction, not magnitude. He argues that the minus sign of '''E'''<sub>k</sub> correctly predicts the downward deflection he personally witnessed on Zinsser's torsion balance in Toronto in 1981; that for Brown's gravitator the increasing positive current points left and so the electrokinetic force points right, matching Brown's own caption "direction of movement of entire system toward positive"; and that a slowly draining capacitor gives a ''negative'' ''dI''/''dt'' out of the positive terminal, so the weakening force keeps the ''same'' direction &mdash; which is his explanation of Brown's and Zinsser's slow "storage effect" decay. The Campbell NASA patents (#6,317,310 and others) and Serrano's PCT design are read the same way: current through the capacitor-dielectric one way, force the other.

Since a sinusoidal drive would reverse the force each half-cycle, Valone recommends waveshaping: the Schlicher patent's SCR-triggered current surge with a steep leading edge and a slowly declining tail, continued into the negative half-cycle, would he argues yield a unidirectional force during 75% of the cycle. He acknowledges frankly that the electrokinetic theory "does not include the mass contribution to the electrogravitic force which Saxl, Woodward, and Brown's 1929 gravitator emphasize," and cites Musha's alternative derivation which includes a mass term but no derivative.

===Pushing against space===

Valone confronts the obvious objection directly: the difficulty of "conceptualizing or simply accepting the possibility of an unbalanced force creation pushing against space." He offers three precedents he regards as already established &mdash; the back torque of a homopolar generator; Graham and Lahoz's demonstration, which he glosses as showing that "the vacuum is the seat of Newton's third law," citing Einstein and Laub on the time derivative of the Poynting vector integrated over all space; and the Taylor and Schlicher propulsion patents. A final section records eyewitness testimony from Mark McCandlish about a flat-bottomed craft demonstrated at Norton Air Force Base in 1988, whose radial plates and distributor-cap pulse discharge Valone compares with the Campbell and Serrano designs, and notes Hal Puthoff's private assessment that the account was credible.

==Assessment==

The best thing in this paper is its taxonomy. Valone's insistence on distinguishing a mass-dependent "electrogravitic" claim from a mass-independent "electrokinetic" one is exactly the discrimination this literature usually blurs, and it gives a clean experimental programme: measure the force, vary the mass, and see whether the force follows. He also concedes the ion-wind explanation of lifters rather than fighting it, and he is explicit that his own theory does not yet reproduce the mass dependence that his primary sources emphasise. The Jefimenko field itself is not fringe physics: it is a standard term in the retarded solution of Maxwell's equations, and for parallel plates it reduces to the familiar inductive back-EMF of a transmission line. Grounding the discussion in that rather than in a novel force law is a real methodological improvement over the 1956 Aviation Studies literature.

The difficulties, however, run deep.

'''The theory cannot deliver what the paper wants from it.''' The electrokinetic field is an ''internal'' field: it acts on charges within the device, between the plates and in the dielectric. Being a consequence of Maxwell's equations, it obeys the momentum conservation those equations enforce, in which mechanical momentum plus field momentum (the volume integral of '''E'''&times;'''H'''/''c''<sup>2</sup>) is conserved. A theory built from a term of Maxwell's equations cannot produce net thrust on a closed system by that route; it can only redistribute momentum inside it. Valone senses this and reaches for "pushing against space," but the examples he offers do not support it. The homopolar generator's back torque is a reaction on the current-carrying circuit, not on the vacuum. Graham and Lahoz's experiment demonstrated ''field'' angular momentum &mdash; and thereby ''restored'' [[Newton's Third Law|Newton's third law]] for a system that appeared to violate it. That is the opposite of what the argument requires: it shows the books balance once the field is counted, not that space can be pushed against.

'''The performance figures are internally inconsistent.''' Valone writes that Woodward's "micronewton level of force... is actually the same order of magnitude which Zinsser produced, who reported his results in dynes (1 dyne = 10<sup>-5</sup> Newtons)." But he then gives Zinsser's forces as "100 dynes to over one pound," that is 10<sup>-3</sup> N to about 4.4 N. A micronewton is 10<sup>-6</sup> N. The two claims differ by three to six orders of magnitude, and cannot both be right. Since the comparison is used to argue that independent experimenters are seeing the same effect, this is not a bookkeeping detail.

'''The N/W comparison proves nothing.''' Force per unit input power is not a figure of merit that separates anomalous propulsion from ordinary propulsion &mdash; it separates ''slow'' exhaust from ''fast'' exhaust. For any device that pushes on reaction mass, thrust per watt goes as 2/''v''<sub>e</sub>, so a jet engine's low 0.016 N/W reflects a high exhaust velocity, not a difficulty in making force. A hovering helicopter rotor reaches roughly 0.09 N/W by the same physics, five times the DC-9 figure, with no new physics at all. (Valone's own conversion is also slightly off: 3 lb/hp is 0.018 N/W, not 0.016.) The relevant benchmark for a genuinely ''propellantless'' device is the photon rocket, 1/''c'' = 3.3&times;10<sup>-9</sup> N/W. Zinsser's claimed 6 N/W exceeds that by nine orders of magnitude, and a force that persists after the input is removed would deliver more power than it consumes as soon as the device moves faster than about 17 cm/s. A claim of that shape needs an explicit accounting of where the energy comes from, and the paper offers none.

'''The evidence is largely testimonial.''' Saxl's eclipse-correlated period changes, Brown's 1929 effects "from the sun, moon and even slightly from some of the planetary positions," Zinsser's reported "bacteriostasis and cytostasis" and Brown's effects on plants and animals are presented as mutually corroborating because they resemble each other. But shared anomalies of this kind are also what one expects from shared systematic error &mdash; and torsion balances at high voltage are notoriously sensitive to air currents, electrostatic attraction to nearby surfaces, thermal drift and humidity. The paper does not report a single control experiment, a vacuum test, or a mass-varied run. The closing section, which rests on eyewitness testimony about a 1988 demonstration and a third party's private opinion that the witness was credible, is not evidence of any kind and weakens the sections that precede it.

'''A smaller point of usage.''' The thrust is described as "exponential, depending on the square of the applied voltage." A square is not an exponential; and a ''V''<sup>2</sup> dependence is precisely what corona-driven ion wind predicts, since the corona current rises roughly as ''V''(''V'' &minus; ''V''<sub>0</sub>). The scaling Valone offers as evidence for an electrokinetic force is therefore not a discriminator against the conventional explanation he has already acknowledged for the lifters.

What survives is the review function. The paper is a useful, well-referenced map of who claimed what, with patent numbers, and it names a specific classical field term that could in principle be computed for each geometry. Valone says himself that "more detailed information is needed for each example in order to actually calculate the theoretical electrokinetic force and compare it with experiment." That calculation is the paper the subject needs, and this is not yet it.

==See also==

* [[Thomas F Valone]]
* [[Oleg D Jefimenko]]
* [[Maxwell's Equations]]
* [[Electrodynamics]]
* [[Lorentz Force]]
* [[Newton's Third Law]]
* [[Mach's Principle]]
* [[Inertia]]
* [[Vacuum]]
* [[Casimir Effect]]
* [[Zero Point Energy]]
* [[Michael Faraday]]

[[Category:Scientific Paper|electrokinetics propellantless propulsion source]]

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