Electric Jet-Engine

We live in the age of electrification - there is a very strong drive to electrify all of transportation including cars, airplanes, and helicopters. In most cases, electric aircraft, whether winged or eVTOL (electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing), utilize propellers or electric ducted fans for flight. For some this would suffice, but what happens to those that want speed without sacrificing "environmental friendliness"? On first thought, they are straight out of luck. Reason is simple, for high-speed flight (supersonic and beyond) you need high-speed exhaust. Rotating airfoils such as propellers or fans cannot push the air sufficiently fast.

There is a way out and it's called an electric jet-engine. In short, instead of generating the hot exhaust through a chemical combustion process (like a typical jet-engine), the exhaust gas comes from a plasma source powered by electricity. Note that you can use lithium-batteries to power this engine, but because plasma needs a lot of electrical power, a massive and impractical battery would be needed.

Let's examine the theory behind such an engine. As with its combustion jet-engine cousin, the electric jet-engine would contain a compressor at the front which would be driven by an electric motor. This compressor pushes the air into the engine. Right after the compressor stage, there are several electric grids which ionize the incoming air and convert it to plasma. The next step is to channel this plasma into a magnetic field. While in the field, microwave radiation heats the plasma to its final temperature. Finally, the hot plasma is ejected via a magnetic nozzle into the atmosphere to generate thrust. An important advantage of the electric jet is that because it does not rely on combustion, it can work in any atmosphere (not just on Earth).

From a practical point of view, the design described above is full of issues. In order to fully ionize incoming air, you would require a lot of grids at a fair spacing from each other, making the engine long and thin, highly incompatible with modern aircraft design. Also, suspending plasma in magnetic fields requires cryogenic cooling, rare-earth elements, and heavy magnets. It is an incredibly complex machine, and every stage of this engine consumes electricity - it is a safe bet that such a device could not be built today.

For the time being, those who seek supersonic travel through the atmosphere will rely on combustion-based jet-engines, while the slower, inner-city commuters will enjoy the "green future" as they fly around in eVTOL aircraft.

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