Using a laser to heat nitrogen gas.

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divide that into the speed of light and you have the wave length to use.

ruveyn

Thanks, getting there.

at that wavelength the only thing i can come up with for a decent amount of cash would be a homemade nitrogen laser pumping a liquid dye chamber, the central chamber however may be relatively hard to construct perfectly, requiring wavelength specific coatings on both the glass and inner surface, not the same one mind you, dunno how a cruder device would impact performance.

even then you are very deep into the far infrared and the above suggestion would probably still fall far short without some sort of wvelength doubling, i know some YAG lasers have the option comercially, dunno if a nitrogen laser can use the same method.

i still think a directed magnetic heating method might work better in the application, that is based on pure speculation though.
damn you have gotten me curious.

ShroxJet technology

It's a steam jet engine, A fore chamber heats the incoming air to well over the boiling point of water, (thus the laser, maser or X-aser) then injects a fine water mist into the hot airstream in a aft chamber. Water expands to steam at a 1600:1 ratio. That's a lot, and expanding quickly that's a lot of thrust. If it works it would be astonishing, even better that an Aspie did it! Maybe those interested could work together on it. Supersonic travel with steam.

I've been doing some sims that assumes the air can be heated hot enough and quickly enough, and it will work. I have some images as well.

Opinions? Questions? Obvious flaws?

What about heating with a electric arc?

Can you cite your source for this number please?

Molecular nitrogen most likely has more than one emission line since there are 5 pairs total of valence electrons in a nitrogen molecule.

Ruveyn: Molecular nitrogen is inert at the normal temperature ranges found on Earth because of its highly stable, triple bond. It takes a fair amount of heat to disrupt that bond and only Fluorine can do this without any added heat.

This was my first find, then I found another after several minutes of searching for "What is the resonant frequency of nitrogen?"

http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/in ... 554AAl7HYh

the concept is intriquing to say the least,

that said there will be added heat, quite a lot of it in a small area, i am no chemist so i dont know if nitrogen will react at that point.

one major issue is still the heating since a dye laser is quite bulky and a a solidstate laser is very far from reachingthe optimal wavelenght

Yes, heating some component of the incoming air or the whole of the air itself quickly is the key. It needs to be fairly hot because the water mist injection will absorb a lot of the heat.

i still think mirowave heating of the water tiself is the way to go,

cavity magnetrons while somewhat heavy(still much less so than a dye laser) are fairly compact and they can be made insanely powerfull.
another plus is that multiple high power water heaters are already in comercial production lowering costs and assembly time.

i also think the microwaves in a reflective "evaporation chamber" would provide equal or better coverage to that of gas convection heating.
the largest issue then would be stray radiation escaping from the nozzle, as i understand it a bend immedietly before the nozzle will also make for a non symetrical thrust profile while incurring huge amounts of force to the structure.

you could in theory do away with the gas flow entirely and simply rely on the water itself and a reinforced and reflective evaporation chamber, perhaps circle the water down the outside of the chamber to provide cooling, perhaps even preheat it enough to lower the required energy once the engine is running hot.
i havent done any calculations of microwaves at all so i dont know how the thermal proflie or anything would look.

>extremely powerful laser
>fits in a toolbelt
Pick one, not both.

And excuse me, I haven't had a chance to sneak into laser physics classes yet (but I'm so going to <.<), but um, can you actually make an efficient laser for any frequency? I thought the reason most lasers are of the same few wavelengths (like red and green) is that they're produced by moving electrons around in the outer layers of gasses or crystals. If it was "easy" to produce a laser for any wavelength (excluding filtering light or moving the viewer toward the laser at the speed of light), wouldn't they be more readily available to the general public? Or is it just a matter of them being a little more expensive but still of the same size as consumer lasers?

It's not for that!

Laser is now a kind of general term I guess, from infrared to microwave and X-ray even.