ANTIMATTER ENGINE HOW TO
ANTIMATTER ENGINE FULL

ANTIMATTER ENGINE HOW TO

Indeed, the best you can do is c/(2*pi*g) with a kind of photon rocket we know how to build. That wastes a major fraction of your theoretical I SP. We don't have mirrors that work at these photon energies, which means the shielding behind a photon rocket will be absorbing the radiation. That, too, comes with huge technological challenges. Nonetheless, the absolute best I SP you can get is if 100% of fuel mass is converted into energy, and that's a photon drive. Simplest one is firing pellets or plasma beams of antimatter into larger propellant pellets and have the explosion push the damper similar to nuclear pulse propulsion, but there are more creative ideas as well, down to using antimatter to drive a plasma rocket of some sort. There are other intermediate technologies that can use antimatter as power source and a dedicated propellant to produce much higher I SP than a steam rocket, but it's a bit more complex than just heating water with gamma radiation from a matter-antimatter reaction. I SP of a steam rocket would be comparable to LH 2/LOX chemical rocket, so it's not a huge improvement at a big increase in cost. The I SP of a perfect photon drive can be as high as c/g. Photons produce less thrust for the same energy input, but they produce far better I SP. Would they produce as much thrust as vaporising something else (like water, as I said above)? Using the radiation itself as propulsion would undoubtedly be more efficient though. When you thrown in the mass of the neutron and the associated binding energy of the gluons which hold the nucleus together, the total 'rest mass' in an atom is less than 0.2% of the total mass.įrom what I recall it's the binding energy between the quarks, but that can be construed to be kinetic energy as well. 99% of the mass of the proton comes from the kinetic energy of those quarks and the gluons that hold them together. Add that up and you find that the constituent quarks in a single photon mass just 1.663e-26 grams, just under one percent of the mass of the proton. The rest mass of an up quark is 4.02e-27 grams and the rest mass of a down quark is 8.59e-27 grams. The nucleus of an atom has more mass than the constituent neutrons and protons it contains.Ī proton has a mass of 1.6726e-24 grams and it is made of two up quarks and one down quark. Nope - the vast majority of mass is relativistic mass from the energetic motion of the particles it contains. How exactly? As far as i remember the mass of ordinary matter is very close to the mass of the protons/neutrons its made of, isnt it?

The antimatter would annihilate with a small amount of the propellant, which would heat up the rest of the propellant and push it out as reaction mass. So you would inject a small amount of antimatter into a large propellant flow (like liquid hydrogen or liquid methane or even water). You could use any remass - liquid hydrogen, liquid methane, even water - and get a different performance level, but the energy source remains the same.Ī hypothetical antimatter engine would work the same way. The remass is liquid hydrogen and the energy source is the nuclear reactor. However, the SSME actually mixed in four extra pounds of hydrogen to help cool the engine and provide additional remass.įor a nuclear thermal rocket like NERVA, the energy source and the reaction mass are completely separate. When burning liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen together, you achieve the maximum amount of energy with two pounds of hydrogen for every one pound of oxygen. One example where remass and energy source are partially separate is actually none other than the Space Shuttle Main Engine. The energy source and the remass can be separate. You could even have a hydrazine thruster for a jet aircraft which used a turbofan to compress air and mix it into the exhaust, which would actually be more efficient. You could have a hydrazine thruster that mixed the exhaust with water in order to produce a cooler exhaust with more thrust, even though the water would make the entire affair less efficient. It's important to note that even though the exhaust and the reaction mass are the same thing, here, that doesn't necessarily need to be the case. When hydrazine decomposes into ammonia and nitrogen gas, it releases heat which in turn accelerates that ammonia and nitrogen gas to produce thrust. Here the energy is not contained in pressurization, but in the chemical energy of the propellant. The momentum of the escaping reaction mass confers equal and opposite momentum on the vehicle.Ī monopropellant thruster (like HTP or hydrazine) comes next. The energy was put into the nitrogen gas when it was pressurized open the valve and the pressure pushes the gas out.

ANTIMATTER ENGINE FULL

You've got a compressed tank full of nitrogen gas. The simplest rocket engine is a cold-gas thruster.

For any rocket engine, you need two things: an energy source and a working mass (also known as reaction mass or remass).

Antimatter engine