China has developed a super generator capable of powering laser and directed energy weapons
Beijing scientists say they have developed a generator that can transform a hot gas moving at hypersonic speeds into an intense electric current capable of powering futuristic directed-energy weapons.
The electricity produced could be used to charge military lasers, microwave weapons, electromagnetic guns and other pulsed energy weapons, according to the team led by assistant researcher Zhang Xiaoyuan of the Mechanics Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
According to the researchers, the technology could also be used for civilian purposes, such as devices for the production of nuclear fusion energy or to send strong SOS signals in an emergency.
The device produced more than 10 times the energy generated in previous experiments, the researchers said in a paper published Jan. 19 in the Chinese Journal of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics.
The generator works by triggering explosions that transform the gas into a fast-moving plasma. Then it converts the plasma energy into high-power electricity, whereby explosions are transformed into energy almost directly.
In one experiment, the system generated high-energy shock waves through an explosion of hydrogen and oxygen. The shock waves compressed the argon gas and accelerated it to Mach 14, or 14 times the speed of sound, transforming the inert gas into a highly conductive plasma filled with hot, electrically charged ions.
The plasma is passed through a component called a magnetohydrodynamic generator (MHD), a tube-like instrument that can harvest the energy of fast-moving ions and convert it into electricity.
The MHD generator produced rapid electric current pulses of up to 212 kilowatts using less than a liter of hypersonic gas, demonstrating its potential to release a burst of energy in an extremely short period of time for military use, according to the researchers.
The MHD generator provides a solution to some of the major limitations in the development and deployment of pulsed and directed energy weapons, which deliver massive blasts of energy to destroy a target, but whose payload is inconsistent with normal generation systems except huge and complex. Furthermore, the energy of these traditional systems must be stored using supercapacitors in order to then be released very quickly, and supercapacitors are heavy, bulky and expensive. That's why we still don't see directed energy weapons in circulation.
This innovation will allow the development of directed energy weapons capable of countering even hypersonic missiles. A great victory for Chinese technology over the rest of the world.
Thanks to our Telegram channel you can stay updated on the publication of new articles from Economic Scenarios.
The article China has developed a super generator capable of powering laser and directed energy weapons comes from Economic Scenarios .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/la-cina-ha-sviluppato-un-super-generatore-in-grado-di-alimentare-armi-laser-e-a-energia-diretta/ on Thu, 02 Feb 2023 09:00:37 +0000.