Modern marine propulsion remains dependent on mechanical screw propellers, a paradigm constrained by cavitation, turbulent vortex shedding, and fundamental momentum-theorem efficiency limits. This paper proposes and analyses Resonant Ionic Momentum Transfer (RIMT), a solid-state propulsion mechanism that converts the entire wetted hull surface of a vessel into a distributed electrokinetic engine. RIMT applies a MHz-frequency asymmetric traveling-wave potential via a sub-surface interdigitated electrode lattice, manipulating the Electrical Double Layer (EDL) of seawater to generate directed ionic flow through electro-osmotic coupling. Operation in the Faradaic-suppression band (2–5 MHz, where the per-half-cycle Faradaic charge falls below the water-splitting threshold) prevents electrolytic degradation, enabling efficient momentum injection without chemical loss. A modular 30 cm × 30 cm Active Tile architecture, driven by GaN wide-bandgap power electronics, provides fault tolerance, scalability, and adaptive frequency control. First-order computational models validate the mechanism: the Péclet number at the hull–fluid interface is, confirming that electric-field-driven ion transport dominates Brownian diffusion by nearly two orders of magnitude. Efficiency analysis under the proposed §3.3 asymmetric sawtooth waveform shows that an untuned configuration (1 µm AlO dielectric, 200 V fixed drive) is dominated by ohmic heating in the seawater between electrodes (driven by the AC displacement current that charges the dielectric capacitor) and achieves only, demonstrating that adaptive voltage control is essential. An optimised design (500 nm TaO ALD dielectric, analytically tuned 5.3 V drive) reaches (tile-boundary efficiency — electrical input to tile against useful thrust, DC bus and GaN PEM losses not included; first-order upper bound at the assumed coupling factor; see §4.4.1 sensitivity table for the full range – where varies from 52 % to 96 %; full battery-to-thrust chain; experimental validation pending) — a modelled upper bound that is conditional on the assumed coupling factor and is not robust against an order-of-magnitude revision in (over the §4.4.1 range – the same model spans to , straddling the ~70–72% practical efficiency ceiling of mechanical propulsion). This headline figure is therefore presented as a modelled target for experimental falsification rather than as a demonstrated advantage over mechanical propulsion. The same first-order model discloses three further caveats that the community is explicitly invited to test (Appendix D): an unenhanced-coupling floor of (the 83% figure requires an unproven ~25× enhancement of the coupling above its first-principles divider, which the seawater concentration-suppression literature argues against rather than for, §4.1); a previously-omitted TaO dielectric-loss () channel that at its literature-nominal value would by itself pull from 83% toward ≈41% (§4.4.3); and a one-to-two-order-of-magnitude inconsistency in the momentum cross-check of the 50 N m design thrust density (§4.4.4). The headline is thus conditional on and jointly on the thrust-density reconciliation, none of which this disclosure resolves. A multi-parameter sensitivity analysis (§4.4.2) confirms that carrier frequency dominates among the environmental and operational axes — efficiency spans 94 % to 46 % as increases from 1 to 5 MHz due to the quadratic scaling of ohmic heating with frequency — while wave–fluid slip and seawater conductivity have comparatively modest influence within the normal operating envelope. The author publishes this architecture as a prior-art disclosure under CC BY-SA 4.0, establishing open prior art and inviting experimental validation by the global research community.
uchimata2 (Tue,) studied this question.