Altitude dependence of electrohydrodynamic flow in an electrostatic lifter

Abstract Experiments carried out during the last 50 years have elucidated the basic mechanism of the Biefeld-Brown effect. Recent research has focused on establishing design rules in order to maximize the lifting force resulting from this effect. For this purpose, a numerical estimation that takes the effect of altitude into account is needed. In the present contribution, the thrust due to Biefeld-Brown effect was computed by simulating the corona-discharge-induced electrohydrodynamic flow in a widely used high-voltage asymmetric capacitor with the major goal to elucidate the dependence of thrust on the altitude, pressure, temperature and humidity, respectively. Our numerical results reproduced the experimentally observed decrease of thrust with altitude and shown that this is a consequence of various competing effects.