Electric airplane

“NASA uses prize competitions to increase the number and diversity of the individuals”
Wonder what they mean by diversity.

Exciting news on the technology. Discouraging news on the political correctness of NASA’s prize criteria (“diversity”). If this remains feel-good rhetoric, it’s bad enough. If it gets baked into formal requirements for team membership, it’s fatal. But let’s hope that NASA will –in the best sense of the phrase– “keep [its] eyes on the prize.”

Calculating: 1hp =745 watts, 145kw = 194 hp, 145kw X 2hr =290kwh 1gal gasoline=36.6kwh
My guess is someone left a decimal out of the engine power rating. two 195hp engines should drag most regular airplanes along at something like 200mph.

Correction: Piper twin: 15.5gph, 2X190hp, 165knts = 189mph. I still think someone left a decimal out of the engine power.

It would be nice to point out, that Pipistrel-USA.com is dauther firm of Pipistrel from Ajdovščina Slovenia http://www.pipistrel.si/ . And that the prize is personel succses of Ivo Boscarol.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipistrel
BTW, there in Ajdovščina lives/blows terible wind bora (burja) but wine and food is very good.
http://sl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burja
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bora_%28wind%29

“Half a gallon per passenger? Is there someone who can quickly calculate if that is possible?”
The key is in “…or the equivalent in electricity”. If you calculate the total chemical energy in the fuel (plus the oxidant (oxygen)) and the convert it to the equivalent in electrical power you approximately treble the available energy. Electrical engines are almost 100% efficient.
Never mind that it took at least four times as much chemical energy to generate that electricity, transmit it and cram it into the battery.

Any electric device using sufficient power to win speed/economy prizes etc need powerful batteries and unless the Green image is to be promoted all these devices should not use fossil fuel generated electricity! Only wind and solar power should be allowed.
The idea that electric powered aircraft will spawn many jobs is pure smoke and mirrors. Any cold weather will limit their range, as in electric cars [another politico science green scam]
Interesting technically and for short journeys they would be fun but to be frank they are a curiosity and nothing much more. Until someone invents lightweight compact huge capacity batteries [that won’t catch fire/work in cold weather] it will cost a lot of taxpayers money in subsidies and like Solyndra has proved how unGreen most Warmist green projects are I wish the electric airplane industry good luck but they won’t get one penny from me by choice.

IIRC, an Airbus A380 uses about 2 litres/100km per passenger on long-haul flights.
I couldn’t find the GFC rules easily… is takeoff counted in the energy consumption? Maybe I misunderstaood what “powered glider” means, but don’t they usually get towed to altitude?

I gallon aviation fuel equivalent to about 36 kilowatthours of electricity.
It must be pretty close to being able to put solar panels on it and it could fly all day on solar.

Without a major breakthrough in battery design, the payload weight of batteries will always make battery powered aircraft non commercially viable.

Regretfully this whole post and NASA’s slant on it is being made to sound as if the Taurus Electro G4 aircraft is American and that America is first with electrically powered aircraft.
The “Pipstrel” company is a Slovenian company and produces a range of high performance ultra light piston powered aircraft using glider construction technology to achieve very high strength loadings, light weight and exceptional performance. They also produce the dual seat electrically powered, self launching gliders such as the Taurus 2 seat glider of which the G4 uses the major components such as fuselage and wings. They also produce the single seat, ultra light class glider, the “Apis / Bee”. Both gliders have glide ratios above 40 to 1.
PIPISTREL d.o.o. Ajdovščina
GORIŠKA CESTA 50a
SI-5270 AJDOVŠČINA
SLOVENIA
Slovenia Pipstrel site ; http://www.pipistrel.si/
From the EAA site; http://www.eaa.org/news/2011/2011-08-13_pipistrelFF.asp
Pipistrel, founded by CEO Ivo Boscarol, has been producing Light aircraft for 20 years in Slovenia, with more than 1,000 completed overall.
American / Australian agents site; http://www.mcp.com.au/sinus/index.html
The difference in the current WUWT / NASA post is that with the American modified twin fuselage, a very good load of very high tech, high energy density batteries can be carried enabling the range and the performance that was achieved by the Taurus Electro G4.
But there are other very high performance electrically launched sail planes like the “Antares 20E ; 20 meter electric self launching, very high performance sail plane.
http://www.lange-aviation.com/htm/english/products/antares_20e/antares_20E.html
And a view of their fuel celled aircraft under development on the site as well..
And then there is also the Italian built “Alisport Silent” electric self launching sail plane
[ http://www.alisport.com/eu/eng/silent_b.htm ] plus a number of other European sail plane designers and manufacturers pushing ahead with new electric launch sail plane designs. Further advanced designs are underway on long range electrically powered aircraft using the very high performance characteristics of glider design as their design base to achieve the efficiencies of flight that will be necessary for electrically powered aircraft to operate on a practical basis..
And glider pilots do smile quietly at the amount of propaganda from Boeing on their “pioneering” use of FRP [ Fibre Reinforced Plastics. ] in the 737 Dreamliner.
The first fully FRP aircraft to fly was the the Akaflieg Stuttgart FS-24 Phönix which was a glider designed and built in Germany starting from 1951. [ Wiki ]
It’s first flight was on the 27 November 1957.
By 1970 the world’s production of gliders were all being manufactured in FRP except in the USA..
http://www.acmanet.org/cm/1006/feature_j1006.cfm
Some of the major fatigue work on aircraft FRP structures was done some years ago here in RMIT in Melbourne Australia. We had RMIT’s heavily instrumented two seat gust and aerodynamic loads data sampling glider operating from our local airstrip for some time as the researchers developed the aerodynamic gust and loading profiles for their FRP fatigue test rig.
They ran that fatigue test glider which included major repairs to the spar structure in one wing for some 30,000 hours without any fatigue problems and then somebody accidently / carelessly left the infrared heating test lights on over the weekend on just the one wing.
Disaster! The wing lost partial strength and deformed under the sustained heat of the infrared lamps..
The European FRP glider designers were absolutely delighted. Now they knew exactly how much heat and energy were the limiting factors before FRP structures of this type started to suffer loss of structural strength.

I wonder how they will do in an electrical storm….OR a three hour holding pattern?

Er, that would be taxpayer money NASA is lavishing about as prize money for a contest that many here are calling irrelevant, correct?

Electric RC planes (small, weigh about 20 lbs) have been used by the military for gathering combat intel for several years and they are useful for that purpose. But some things just don’t scale up well, and this is one of them.
Among other things, the craft would be limited to a 10k foot ceiling, and perfect weather (pressurization & icing would be problems, as would any significant head wind, etc. ). As has been said, this is only a toy, not even suitable for General Aviation, let alone commercial.

Looks like a “way cool” toy for rich hobbyists. Wish I had one for the farm, assuming lift off can be achieved under a mile, with some remaining power capacity! GK

Bernd Felsche 2:36:
“……aren’t they usually towed to altitude?”
Usually, yes, but you can get a glider that has a small engine and propeller that pops up out of the fuselage behind the pilot and sinks back into it when you reach altitude and you start gliding. Very useful, but I believe you have to have the full private pilot’s license to fly it.

The next big leap in aviation will be in the development of ‘zeppelin’ type blimps, welcome to the 1920s lol, That being said I have always thought that blimps were a great idea even if it was only for the haulage of goods, it’s probably not as practical for human passengers, but they can be very useful depending on the weather and some journeys without time constraints.
The ‘Electric airplane’ idea is another pipe-dream and a waste of money, simply put the numbers do not add up to any over all net savings, imagine owning a fleet of 10 commercial Electric passenger airplanes, the charge time for such a battery even if it existed could be 12+ hours between flights, where would the charge come from? an especially built expensive solar or wind power plant? what if there was no sun or wind? do the planes get their charge from an especially built backup generator? and what would the cost and life of such a battery be? how many flights before a battery needs to be replaced? After all the investment and finance that would go into setting up a fleet of commercial Electric passenger airplanes and factoring in a team of maintenance engineers and the cabin crew, How on earth could a flight on one of these planes be competitive? Do we subsidize the price of flights and raise taxes to make them appear cheaper?
“Today we’ve shown that electric aircraft have moved beyond science fiction and are now in the realm of practice.”
Yes they may work in practice, but a cheap commercial flight on an Electric passenger airplane is still firmly in the realm of science fiction.

“No, that’s not the name of a rock band.”
But when can we expect Electric Starship?

I see a lot of posts here talking about the uselessness of electric airplanes. For the ordinary airline passenger, I agree. On the other hand, airline travel itself is generally wasteful over land, compared to rail. Over the oceans, air travel is the best way to go, and jets are the most efficient way to get there quickly to date.
This does NOT mean that we should never try to advance the state of the art in small aircraft design. While battery electric is not viable for commercial transportation, it’s a great idea for “self launched gliders.” Hell, I have flown hang gliders for 20 years and once in the air I can often stay up as long as my bladder will allow. If I had a small, efficient plane that could self launch and climb to 5000′, I’d be able to fly it for as long as I was interested in flying for pleasure anyway. If it would stay in the air for a few hours, I could use it to fly to destinations in about a 200 mile radius for much less than I could with a conventional private airplane.
Imagine a personal, sleek, four-person aircraft (already in the $100,000 range for a new craft) that uses a powerful electric engine (100 hp for takeoff, 20 hp for level flight) with a small fuel cell running to sustain flight when flying and charge the small “take off” batteries for the few minutes needed to get the plane to altitude. It would be a good fit for someone who can already afford to fly a private plane. For those who can’t, well, they weren’t going to buy an new airplane anyway.

I built a GlaStar (experimental two seater) with a Subaru Engine. I get 30 mpg at 130 mph and around 40 to 50 mpg at 90 mph. All for less than the cost of the batteries in the winning plane.

http://cafefoundation.org/v2/img_maingraphics/section_maingfx_cafeboard2009.jpg

Electric aviation development has been picking up speed for some time. GE Aviation now has an electric power R&D center in Dayton, Ohio. Boeing’s already built and tested an experimental electric prop powered by fuel cell. The energy density of aviation fuel is a large advantage, but there other advantages of electric motors and batteries are too large to dismiss: noise reduction allowing arrival/departure into otherwise closed-hours airports, no flight ceiling due to the engine, up to 99% efficiency of HTS electric motors, energy cost savings per mile of electric kWh vs Jet-A, thrust from GE90 turbo fan engine is already mostly from the fan (9:1 bypass), etc. While battery based electric jets may not be used to cross oceans in fifty years, if the NY-Boston shuttle is not making electric runs after the noise curfew with a five minute battery swap turn around within thirty years I guess it will not be because of technical or economic limitations.
o 2010 Economist article on numerous electric experimental aircraft.
http://www.economist.com/node/16295620
…completing development of a two-seater called the ElectraFlyer-X. It will be able to fly for two hours and reach a top speed of 128kph (80mph). It can be recharged in around three hours from a built-in charger, has a 15-metre wingspan and a lift-to-drag ratio of around 30:1. The plan is to sell the ElectraFlyer-X in kit form for around $65,000; the batteries cost an extra $15,000.
o GE Aviation plans:
http://www.reliableplant.com/Read/27532/Electric-cars-planes-behind
o Beyond Aviation and Cessna partnership to produce electric Cessna Skyhawk 172. Plan is to carry sufficient batteries for two hours of flight, with a cost per mile flown “several multiples” less than aviation fuel equivalent. Target is the flight training market (multiple 1-2 hour flights per day).
http://www.cessna.com/NewReleases/New/NewReleaseNum-1192324720455.html
http://www.beyond-aviation.com/
o 2009 Masson, Luongo IEEE paper “Next Generation More-Electric Aircraft: A Potential Application for HTS Superconductors.”
http://www.drives.co.uk/fullstory.asp?id=2033
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/search/srchabstract.jsp?arnumber=5153109&isnumber=5166701&punumber=77&k2dockey=5153109@ieeejrns&query=%28%28masson%29%3Cin%3Eau+%29&pos=5&access=no
http://www.masbret.com/asc08/ASC08_Tuesday_Plenary_Electric_Aircraft.ppt
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=4275231&tag=1
o NASA Puffin. Vertical takeoff dual prop aircraft.

http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/blogs/business_aviation/index.jsp?plckController=Blog&plckBlogPage=BlogViewPost&newspaperUserId=2f16318d-d960-4e49-bc9f-86f1805f2c7f&plckPostId=Blog%3a2f16318d-d960-4e49-bc9f-86f1805f2c7fPost%3ad341a5a0-b4d4-4ae1-a99b-9488d0b1d281&plckScript=blogScript&plckElementId=blogDest
300 lb air frame, cruise 150 mph, sprint 300 mph, ceiling 30k feet, 50 mile range at cruise w/ current batteries, eventually 175 miles.

Very interesting. but i will only be convinced when Al Gore uses one!

Until you can put a reactor in a Boeing or Airbus for flight ranges measured in days or weeks, I’m not getting excited.

From the Lange Antares site;
http://www.lange-aviation.com/htm/english/products/antares_h3/antares_h3.html
6000 Kilometer range using fuel-cells
In 2010 the project partners tested how fuel cells perform in aviation, using the flying test-bed, the Antares DLR-H2. During one of these tests, an altitude record of 2560 m (8400 ft) was set. The Antares H3 will demonstrate significantly increased performance: The developers plan to achieve a range of up to 6000 km (3200 Nm), and an endurance of more than 50h. For the Antares H2, these values were respectively 700 km (405 Nm) and 5 hours. The aircraft will have a wingspan of 23 m ((75 ft), a maximum takeoff weight of 1.25 metric tons (2756 lb), and it will carry payloads of up to 200 kg (440 lb). The aircraft will use four external pods to house fuel cells and fuel.
It was from seemingly crude beginnings such as the above that were predicted to be doomed to complete failure by the experts of the time that we got the automobile, aircraft, jet engines, diesel engines and innumerable other items of advanced technology that are now accepted as everyday essential items in our lives.

“Chris Nelli says:
October 4, 2011 at 12:59 pm
Yes, new airplanes like the A380 and 787 easily exceed 100 miles per gallon per passenger”
Yes, but smaller general aviation aircraft the size of those in the contest do not. NASA has them at 5-50mpge per passenger in the article reference links.

“P. Solar says, October 4, 2011 at 2:18 pm:
So real planes burning real fuel get assessed on real primary fuel consumption . Electric planes get assessed on how much electrical energy they consumed converted in ficticious BTU gallons.
Nice trick. So no accounting for the inefficiency of the charge/discharge cycle and above all NO account of how much primary fuel it took to produce the electricity that charged the batteries!…”
If one object of the competition was to inspire greater efficiency in aircraft, then energy used by the aircraft must be the metric. You may have a point about charging efficiency, but I think that should only apply intrinsically, that is if the design included ‘on board’ charging from either a traditional fuel generator or solar array in which case the the final result would reflect charging efficiency. Discharge efficiency was of course accounted for as the battery discharged during flight.

What this is about is obvious in the name they chose – regulations, like ‘CAFE’ standards for cars.
They’ll be mandating a certain number of these in aircraft manufacturers’ fleets. They’ll force airports to allocate a percentage of their landing slots to electrics, like carpool lanes. Forget building a new airport unless it’s a quiet, zero carbon, all-electric one, complete with taxpayer funded solar panel recharging stations. The organizer of this is already talking about how so many people will be using these we’ll need electronic ‘highways in the sky’ where you surrender control of navigation. The market will not materialize, but the regs are sure to happen.
They don’t have to be practical. They just have to be something real they can mandate you to use.

Electric, eh? So if you’re in a situation where terrorists are trying to hijack the plane mid-air, how do you dump the fuel? Do you discharge it into the nearest field of cows by lightning bolt?