veggie oil?? -->> Try Water ?

[Cat ^. .^ ~]

"WATER: THE ULTIMATE  PROPELLANT

"Will water be the fuel of the future to power aircraft and spacecraft?

"If so, mankind will be employing a technology of 
the god's and, as in other fields, modern science 
will be only catching up with ancient knowledge.

"The news of the possible use of water as an 
abundant and clean resource as the "fuel" for jet 
propulsion comes from the Tokyo Institute of 
Technology that has been developing technologies 
for powering small un-piloted planes by 
subjecting their "engines" to laser beams fired 
from the ground or from satellites.  In what has 
been hailed as a great success, the Tokyo team 
reported in the June 10 issue of Applied Physics 
that they made a tiny paper "plane" fly by 
subjecting its "motor" of aluminum plates to 
laser beams.  Causing minute amounts of the metal 
to vaporize, a jet stream was achieved that cause 
the plane to soar.

"The experiment thus attained the trick of 
creating an ejected jet of some mass that pushed 
the plane forward.  In regular jet planes, the 
jet is created by burning petroleum fuel and 
ejecting the hot gas.  In the Tokyo experiment, 
the heat was provided by the laser beam, the jet 
by the evaporated aluminum.  To scale the 
propulsion system up to full size, Takashi Yabe, 
head of the Tokyo team, proposed using water as 
the propellant.    Water can be harvested from 
the atmosphere as the plane files,î he said. 
Reporting the experiment and the water-use idea, 
the journal New Scientist (15 June 2002) 
illustrated the futuristic "water engineî " 
........  "

http://www.20kweb.com/weird_stuff/water_the_ultimate_propellant.html

-- 
Cheers,  Fay

^. .^   ~