Bussard Ramjet - Hyung jin(Kevin) Kim
Bussard Ramjet
Introduction
For an interstellar journey, speed that is comparable to the speed of light is needed.
In 1960, Bussard proposed a ramjet variant of fusion rocket capable of
fast interstellar spaceflight.
The theory behind the ramjet is pretty simple.
Since the current rocket system faces the exponential mass problem to
travel an interstellar scale distance, the idea is to collect the
fuel from the space. This allows the ship to have a very small portion of payload so that it can
keep accelerating for any given amount of time and gets arbitrarily close to the speed of light.
As it travels, the ramjet scoops up hydrogen atoms to fuel the ship using
a gigantic scale of magnetic field and feed into the nuclear fusion engine to propel itself.
Problems Faced
Basically, I don't know how to turn this topic into a computational physics.
I could ask myself some questions like the velocity of the initial boost required
or the scale of magnetic field and magnitude of velocity that are required to keep
the engine going at a feasible rate but those kinds of questions seem to have
a set answer so there is not much to compute or don't have much meaning to it or
too uncertain since all of these things are impossible to start with.
Or maybe I'm missing the whole detail and thinking there isn't much to the problem.
The best one I can think of was to get some distribution of deuterium and tritium
,the fuel of the ramjet, in the space and numerically integrate acceleration to get
the estimated velocity function of whole trip. Kevin Kim 00:37, 20 November 2008 (PST)
Another thing that I thought of was to search all the calculated ideal values of each variables for the ramjet to work then relax one of the parameters and see what happens to other parameters for the ramjet to maintain its function and figure out how exactly they are related. Kevin Kim 15:15, 20 November 2008 (PST)
As professor Brewer suggested, I have decied to do the simulation of the distance between the ship and the destination of the trip that changes over time as the spacecraft travels in the frame of the ship. What is interesting here is that as the ship keeps on accelerating the velocity of the ship gets closer and closer to the speed of light, the gamma factor that governs lenght contraction and time dialation gets bigger and bigger. Therefore, the ship gets closer
to the destination at a increasing rate due to its increasing velocity but also the distance between the ship and the destination gets shorter and shorter in the frame of the ship according to the special relativity.
I am going to use maple to simulate this but initally I'll have to figure out the equation of the motion.Kevin Kim 19:00, 20 November 2008 (PST)
