Speculation on the Operation of Elon Musk's Electric Jet Powerplant Concept - Refrigerant Cycle Jet
Channel: DumbledoreMcCracken
Date: 2020-05-24

Here I speculate is Elon Musk's concept of an electric jet power plant.

The speculation is that much of the mechanical work, done to compress the incoming air by the compressor blades, is captured by heating a cooling refrigerant passing through the compressor fan assembly, and that captured energy (enthalpy) is then intensified by a refrigerant plant (heat pump), and then that heat is released at a higher temperature into air passing over heating coils in the tail expansion nozzle of the jet.

So, the work done by the electric motor, to compress the air, is reduced by the cooling process - much like an intercooler on an automotive engine (requiring less input power), and the heat removed from the compression of the air is converted to thrust by the tail end heating coils.

This has no hope of producing usable thrust because the air passing through the jet has zero energy added to it.