Tuesday, June 2, 2015

Electric Airplanes - A reality in the Future?

7 comments:

  1. Jose, please check the link, it is severely broken....

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  2. AnonymousJune 02, 2015

    There is a mistake in the article: Pipistrel is not from Slovakia,he is from Slovenia!! :)
    http://www.pipistrel.si/

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  3. are U an aircraft engineer?

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    1. Nope, but i work in an airline company.

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  4. In my opinion you can forget batteries as the basis for electric airliners. They will always be a lot heavier than fossil fuels. And weight matter a LOT more when it comes to flying.
    On the other hand I don't understand their obsession with cryo cooling. Modern electric motors have showed excellent power density and low weight. (eg: yasa motors, evans electric) If you further want to spare weight you can go with aluminium or calcium (50%, 65% weight saved respectively) windings instead of copper.
    You can forget H2 and LNG too. They both have horrible volumetric energy density and extreme pressurization needs.
    That said for electric aircraft I can only see fuel cells as being viable. But even methanol (easy to synthesize) is not good enough. It only has less than half the energy density of petrol.
    Maybe something like butane which has good energy density and low pressure requirements. It's also at least biosynthesizable. And fuel cells exist for it.

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    Replies
    1. Thank you for the valuable contribution, i agree with your Fuel Cells approach to airplanes, at least for large ones, they might be the only only to go.

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