Ionic Thrust Wing I o n i c T h r u s t W i n g

This is a deliberately silly project built to show off something cool: a wing that makes thrust from ionized air, with no propellers, no fans and nothing else that moves. It runs on a 400 kV switched power supply, the same technology inside a taser, and it ionizes the air around the wing so strongly that it makes ozone.

I built it to study how the shape of the electrodes changes the thrust, and to show that lift could be made with no moving parts at all. A strip of sharp teeth runs across the top of the wing beside a copper electrode, and the violet glow between them is the air itself being ionized.

Ionized air is invisible, so I used incense smoke to see it move. With the power off, the smoke rises straight up. Once the wing is switched on, it pulls the smoke down toward the electrodes and pushes it across the top of the wing, which is the thrust you otherwise can’t see.