You'll have to a little more specific than that, how long is a piece of string? What is the application of your generation requirements? <p>Nigel Waterhouse<br><a href=mailto:n_a_waterhouse@hotmail.com>n_a_waterhouse@hotmail.com</a><br><a href= > </a><br>A licensed aircraft mechanic and graduate engineer. Attended university in England and graduated in 1996. Currenty,living in British Columbia,Canada, working as a design engineer responsible for aircraft mods and STC's.
One nifty device for making such a conversion is an electric generator (just kidding). Actually, the same phenomena is used to derive electrical energy from the propulsive force of exhaust gasses in a magnetohydrodynamic converter. These devices use rocket engines to force an electrically conductive gas through a magnetic field with high velocity and force. This works exactly the same way that a generator works, the difference being that the generator uses copper wires as the conductor to pass through the magnetic field and the MHD generator uses conductive gas.
The reason such a device is of interest in the astronautics forum is that these devices are well suited to application in space. A solid rocket motor has a relatively large amount of stored potential (chemical) energy in a relatively small package. They are also common to the space business as launch vehicles.
We in the US spent time developing such devices during the cold war days. Since then, funds for such research have dried up. I would love to see this field pick back up because these devices are quite interesting and pack a lot of power in a small package - even if it can only be used for a brief amount of time.
