The commonly used name for these EHD devices made by amateurs is "lifters". The problem with their not being able to fly independently is the power supplies are so heavy. Look for example at the lifter here:
How to: "Lifter" Power Supply.
Quite commonly the lifters weigh, and the thrust they can produce, is in the range of grams but the power supplies weigh in the range of kilograms. So how do you solve that problem?
Let me give an analogy. Many people are aware of the technical innovations the Wright brothers made to be able to develop a successful flying machine. They made their own wind tunnel. They tested various air foils to find efficient ones of high lift. They developed a warping wing technique for steering.
However, not as well known is the one key innovation they made for which all those other innovations would have been worthless. When many scientists of the time after doing a mathematical analysis asserted that no heavier-than air flying machine could work, oddly enough they were *right*. But the problem was, they were basing this on the power sources widely known at the time, steam engines. But the steam engines were so inefficient they could not supply sufficient power for their weight. They were too heavy.
Around the time of the Wright brothers though the internal combustion gasoline engine was coming into use for automobiles, but they were still too heavy for the Wright brothers use. So the one *key* innovation the Wright brothers made was that they designed and built their OWN lightweight internal combustion engine.
Now, back to the EHD propulsion method. The power supplies are too heavy, so what can we do about that? Well, you can make them out of lightweight materials. That's a possible route to follow, but most amateur and even professional experimenters have used ready made power supplies or used ready made parts to build them. The result is they are all pretty standard weight for the power they put out.
But let's analyze this further, *why* are the power supplies so heavy? It turns out the reason they are so heavy is the voltage needed for the ion propulsion method is in the range of tens of thousands of volts, frequently as high as 50,000 volts. This then requires heavy transformers to produce voltage this high. Alright then, can we find a way to reduce the required voltage?
Yes! It turns out if you reduce the diameter of the wires doing the ionization of the air then the required voltage is reduced. In fact, according to the math if the wires are at the nanoscale then the required voltage might be reduced to only tens of volts instead of tens of thousands of volts. For the small-scale lifters, if you used now wires at the nanoscale, it may be they could be powered by a couple of 9-volt batteries connected in series.
So that's the key point, for nanowires the voltage required for ionization is severely reduced. This is the content of Peek's Law:
Bob Clark
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No. And under even ideal conditions, they don't work for long.
Why do people invent (and press release) crazy sci-fi dreams that ignore basic physics? There is a reason why helicopters have gas turbine engines and giant fan blades... and horrendous fuel consumption rates. Why don't they just use their jet engines to lift the vehicle?