Ionic Kinetic Energy Conversion Effect

Yes, I know it sounds like a sneeze, but I can explain it! Naturally, though, a bunch of preliminary background information is essential. Feel free to skip the parts you already know.

In the vacuum of space there is a dichotomy involving temperature. Almost everything is either very much too hot or very much too cold. However, for human beings wanting to live and work in space, there really is only one problem: too much heat.

Everything that people do involves energy being converted from one form to another, whether it be food burned in the cells of a body, or fuel cells converting hydrogen and oxygen into electricity and water. **ALL** such events involve the production of heat as a by-product, and this heat MUST be disposed of, for humans to successfully function in space.

Now at first glance one might think, "What's the big deal? Space is *cold*, isn't it?" But the answer to that is: Being surrounded by the vacuum of space is like being inside a Thermos bottle! Which, you probably know, retains heat really well!

A vacuum helps a hot object to stay hot because there are only three ways for a hot object to become cold, and two of them require a NON-vacuum in order to work. The first method is "conduction"; it requires that the hot object be physically contacting a colder solid object. But any spaceship, surrounded by the vacuum of space, obviously has no such colder solid object in contact with it, most of the time.

The next method, convection, requires that the hot object be in contact with either a liquid or a gas. AND convection generally requires something like a steady gravitational acceleration/force in which to work efficiently. NEITHER of which you will normally find in the vicinity of a working spaceship.

The third method for disposing of heat, radiation, is the only one that works effectively in a vacuum. Unfortunately, it is generally a low-efficiency process. LARGE radiators are required, to permit sufficient amounts of heat to convert from the form of molecular vibration into the form of escaping photons. You don't hear much about the radiator for the International Space Station, but it probably has a mass of several tons.

The ikece is a notion that might improve the efficiency of the situation. More efficient radiators are smaller and less massive -- and thus less expensive overall (it costs more than $10,000 a pound to send one into space, remember). Here is how prepare to find out whether or not the idea will work:

Let us construct a radiator of the following design: It has an aluminum core, with fins, not unlike what you can find inside any ordinary air conditioner unit. (But not exactly like it, either; the fins will probably be quite short.) Next, we add an "oxide coating". Now, ordinarily a hunk of aluminum almost always already HAS an oxide coating on it (microscopically thin; it is a layer of corrosion that is so tough it strongly inhibits further corrosion) -- but the natural oxide coating is too thin for the present device. We don't need a coating that's thicker than, say, a tenth of a millimeter, but we do need something thicker than the norm.

Now we take this radiator and bombard it with low-energy protons in a vacuum chamber. The protons penetrate and get stuck inside the oxide coating of the radiator. Since we are ONLY bombarding with protons, an overall static-electric charge builds up in the oxide coating.

When done, we may decide to add a little more oxide coating, just to make sure the protons are really sealed inside. Overall (describing ONLY the oxide material) we have created an electrostatic thingy known as an "electret".

Next, as part of a different but related task, we do some work with copper. We construct a copper tube, and line the inside the tube with thousands of sharp copper needles. We apply a strong negative static-electric charge to the tube, and then introduce fluorine gas to one end of the tube....

Ordinarily, a negative static-electric charge applied to a needle will leak off rather quickly, forming a "corona discharge", from which the electrons are carried away by air molecules. So inside the copper tube, before letting the fluorine in, the air in the tube is going to be absolutely saturated with loose electrons. And fluorine, being the chemical element with the greediest desire of all for electrons, will mostly take them from the saturated air, and form what we would have to call "freely floating floride ions". (Say that real fast 3 times, anyone?)

Some of the fluorine will chemically react with the copper, but that is OK, because after a copper fluoride layer builds up, that layer will protect against further chemical reaction between the fluorine and the copper. So additional fluorine gas molecules that flow through the tube will all become converted into freely floating fluoride ions.

The fluoride ions will emerge from the other end of the tube, where we direct them toward the radiator assembly. This procedure is done at full atmospheric pressure, perhaps even in an over-pressure chamber. Because the radiator has a fixed positive static-electric charge, the fluoride ions will be happy to go there. We want them to encounter so much air on the way, that when the ions arrive, they simply rest upon the outer surface of the radiator assembly. We definitely do not want them to embed themselves into the oxide layer! When done, the entire static-electric charge in the radiator's oxide coating will be completely neutralized by the fluoride ions resting on the surface of the coating. The radiator is now ready to go to space.

In space, while it is exposed to vacuum and shielded from sunshine, we pump hot liquid through the aluminum tubing in the radiator -- a quite ordinary thing. Heat is conducted to the fins of the radiator -- also an ordinary thing.

Now, the jouncing of atoms and molecules inside the fins of the radiator will probably not affect the buried protons very much, since they are bare atomic nuclei, after all. But the fluoride ions on the surface WILL be affected. Conduction of heat will inevitably arrive, and cause some energy to transfer to the ions.

This is a two-step process: FIRST, some oxide molecule jostles and bumps a fluoride ion and causes it to move a little away from the radiator; SECOND, the electrostatic attraction between the radiator and the ion will bring it back, where it will experience another bump. EVERY fluoride ion on the surface of the radiator will be doing this, constantly.

"So what?" you ask. I have been saving the juciest tidbit for last: Whenever an electrically charged particle is accelerated, it emits a photon! Ordinarily we design radio and TV antennas specifically to efficiently accelerate electrons, and thereby emit radio waves and mircowaves, for communication purposes. HERE we are merely helping the perfectly natural process of converting molecular kinetic energy into infrared radiation, via the intermediary of ionic kinetic energy.

THAT is the explanation of the title of this idea. Every time those fluoride ions bump, as described two paragraphs ago, they are experiencing accelerations! So they will emit photons, again and again and again...which is exactly what we want the radiator to do, efficiently. In theory, of course!