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arc reactor substitute

Alternative method to power flight repulsor jets like Tony Stark's
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I personally think that making an iron man suit would be the second coolest invention ever. Fortunatily, almost all the required tech already exists, exoskeleton suits and even plasma thrusters that use the surrounding air instead of fuel.

The most glaring missing element is the power source. As far as we know arc reactors are completely fictional. So we are back to Obadiah Stane's problem.

At first I thought we would have to use a portable nuclear fission reactor like the one in the Ford Nucleon. But then I found out about super compressing materials using diamond anvils. You could super compress a substance into a small zippo shaped package that then expands slowly but with tremendous force. Attach screw gears to the top and sides of this "battery" which are attached to gear boxes and up gear the expansion force into fast and powerful rotational energy. Run these through simple generators (just motors with the + and - wires switched) and run the resulting power to your plasma thruster.

A bonus is that the expanding material would suck in large amounts of heat as it expands cooling everything around it so the battery might actually cool the generators and maybe the rest of the suit as well.

If the substance you compress absorbs heat too quickly and thus expands too quickly you might need to insulate it slightly to slow down its heat gain and consequently slow down the expansion. If you had a way to dynamically change its insulation you could control the level of power output!

So basically you use the diamond anvils in your awesome Tony Stark lab to super compress these "batteries" stick them in your suit and fly around until they are fully expanded. Then walk back to your lab and compress some more "batteries".

A slight problem I can foresee is that the batteries might be super heavy, I guess this depends on the substance you use and how much of it you use.

A more efficient although notably less awesome version would be to leave out the generators and swap the plasma thrusters for jet turbines that are axeled directly to the gear boxes.

UVmatician, Feb 22 2011

XOS Skeleton http://www.popsci.com/node/20689
real life strength enhancing robotic suit. [UVmatician, Feb 22 2011]

Plasma Thruster http://www.youtube....=PLFF8DBF0B1CD6D633
The "no moving parts" alternative to jet turbines [UVmatician, Feb 22 2011]

Ford Nucleon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Nucleon
Concept of a nuclear fission powered car. [UVmatician, Feb 22 2011]

super compressed xenon diflouride http://ca.io9.com/5...energy-storage-ever
Example of energy storage through super compression. [UVmatician, Feb 22 2011]


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Annotation:







       But what would this power, a small digital watch? I have trouble believing it would power a plasma jet.   

       Now, if you just wanted the powered exoskeleton without the super powers you could power it with a big supercapacitor with an RTG to trickle charge it and extend battery life.
DIYMatt, Feb 22 2011
  

       What would you use for a ion conductor for air?
travbm, Oct 29 2015
  


 

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