Electric Planes: They Have Arrived

Will you ever fly in an

electric

airplane in your lifetime or are

electric

air

planes

just the silly fantasy of dreamers with their heads in the clouds? Air

planes

have

connected our world in ways past generations could never

have

imagined the last time you took a flight. a moment to contemplate and marvel at the engineering masterpiece he was sitting on. I have a feeling the curious crowd here is definitely the window-sitting type. What if your plane could fly with 97% more efficiency, less noise and zero emissions? People think it's impossible before doing something. When I started the solar boost project, it was exactly like that.

Also people first tell me that it is impossible and then, since it is impossible, you find people who come to your team and

they

are people who love to challenge the possible. In this video we collaborate with a team of aerospace engineers, NASA scientists, and veteran pilots to analyze current electric aircraft research and evaluate the most promising new technologies based on practicality and performance economics. We will provide a comprehensive overview of electric aircraft technology and discuss the benefits. and challenges and then classify the most revolutionary electric airplanes electric airplanes are not a new idea, in fact, the first flight powered by electricity predates the Wright brothers by 20 years when in 1883 Gaston and his brother Albert installed a half-horsepower electric plane. motor to an airship the brothers flew for just over an hour powered by their bichrome batteries reaching an incredibly fast speed of 7 miles per hour the first manned electric heavier than air flight had to wait another 90 years electric rc airplanes They were becoming increasingly widespread in the 1960s and it was aerial modeller Fred Militki who converted the quirky Austrian Badishka motor glider to run on Nicad batteries with an 8 kilowatt Bosch motor.

Its first flight in 1973 lasted nine minutes. At the end of the decade, a few years ago a solar-powered plane had taken to the sky. The Chiffon Penguin was a variant of an experimental human-powered plane that weighed only 68 pounds and needed to maintain payload as light as possible the test pilot was the designer's 13-year-old son, rumored to be the boy's mother was not very pleased with the father's pioneering spirit in recent years, the meteoric progress of vehicle electrification It has many looking to the sky wondering if airplanes will one day follow suit, but does it make sense to electrify airplanes or is it just a waste of Tesla energy and Elon Musk, CEO of Spacex, is absolutely convinced that we will fly on electric airplanes of long-distance passengers in the future.

Elon even speculated his ideal hypothetical supersonic electric aircraft. We'll provide a detailed rundown of Elon's plan for a Tesla electric plane later in the video, but before we jump into the future, let's get down to earth: the world is now more focused on sustainability than ever. Air travel produces 915 million tonnes of CO2 each year, accounting for two and a half percent of global emissions and comprising 12 percent. of total emissions from the transportation sector is not the biggest culprit under the sun, but it appears that some forms of pollution have more impact than others. High-altitude emissions are more potent contributors to the greenhouse effect, and airplane contrails have even been shown to have a significant additional warming effect.

Increasing cloud cover as we move toward the electric future of transportation, the aerospace industry is trying to keep pace but is held back by the limitations of current technology and the slow regulatory pace of this necessarily conservative sector. Now, for the first time, there are greens. There are glimmers of electric hope on the horizon, but if you look up at the sky you're not likely to see them yet, unless you're Norwegian and watching this video in a couple of decades because Norway recently mandated that all domestic flights be electric. By 2040, in addition to being environmentally friendly, electric power in aircraft has other potential benefits: first, electric motors experienced no loss of power when operating at high altitude, combustion engines, excluding rockets, They ingest air from the atmosphere to mix it with fuel and burn this air.

Becoming thinner at high altitude, meaning it contains less oxygen. This is a particular problem for piston and turboprop engines, whose performance is significantly reduced. We've all heard the maxim that electric cars require less maintenance and the same can be said for airplane combustion engines. Complex machines with thousands of moving parts and routine maintenance can account for a high proportion of aircraft operating costs. Electric motors are fundamentally simple and no part of the drivetrain is exposed to the harsh environment of high-temperature combustion. The electrical systems also do not suffer from the carburetor. contamination by ice or water and fuel tanks, in addition, the various compact and cold-running configurations of electrified aircraft allow designers more freedom for optimizations compared to conventionally powered aircraft.

A NASA study estimated a 4.8-fold improvement in efficiency for a modified electric aircraft compared to an equivalent conventional aircraft. Electric motors in cruise format are also much quieter than jet and piston engines, so while propeller noise is still considerable, there is enough noise reduction to allow flying where noise restrictions apply. would normally limit operation. This is not an insignificant detail. Noise restrictions were the Concord's original Achilles tendon. The heel and operation of small regional airports are frequently challenged by excessive noise, despite these advantages, electric aircraft have a major drawback that many consider insurmountable: we must face the fact that liquid fossil fuels offer a density astonishingly high energy compared to even the best batteries.

In today's aviation weight is of great importance and directly impacts the range, endurance, takeoff performance and stall speed of an aircraft, exacerbating the battery weight problem. Heavy aircraft must be built with a stronger structure, generally designers want to maximize the amount of payload that can be carried relative to the mass of the aircraft. There is also a major aeronautical advantage of fuel that people often overlook. burning batteries did not noticeably decrease in weight when discharged are as heavy at the end of the flight as

they

were at the beginning of the aircraft design process, fuel consumption is included in the calculations that determine the size and range of the aircraft for long-range aircraft, this increases the range by approximately 10 to 20 percent.

Modern lithium-ion automotive batteries can accumulate up to about 285 watt hours per kilogram, or about one megajoule per kilogram. By comparison, A1 jet fuel contains about 43 megajoules per kilogram, more than 40 times the energy density. This is not the whole story, although electric systems tend to be much more efficient than combustion engines and a The economic analysis of future Rolls-Royce electric commuter aircraft cited a report that estimates that a jet installation has an efficiency of around 26 percent compared to more than 90 percent efficiency for a heat engine with equivalent electric drivetrain. Efficiency is governed by the laws of thermodynamics.

The inherent problem is that most of the energy created by burning fuel is wasted as heat rather than converted into useful work. Fundamentally, aircraft must have a high power-to-weight ratio. Battery technology is expected to improve in the coming decades and there are many exciting developments in the works to create much taller batteries. Energy densities, particularly the use of nanostructures within batteries, look promising and a pan-European research team hopes to produce lithium-sulfur batteries with an energy density of 500 watt hours per kilogram. This battery chemistry is already used by Airbus in its Zephyr solar uav to power the plane through the night, while elon musk could dream of supersonic electric flight, this is probably a long way from concorde.

Four jet engines were needed, each rated at 169 kilonewtons of thrust; those four engines could generate enough thrust to lift a Boeing 737 into the air. like a helicopter just to give an idea of ​​how much air resistance we face, although there have been some interesting advances in research into electric plasma jet propulsion, at the moment we cannot easily achieve high speed exhaust from an engine at reaction using electrical energy. power right now propellers are the most practical means of generating thrust from electrical current and our best chance to put a useful electric aircraft into commercial operation we talked to NASA and it turns out they are really interested in propellers, lots of propellers They understand the reasoning behind it.

A strange configuration is the key to reaping the benefits of electric aviation when you think of innovative flying machines, one name comes to mind, so it's no surprise that NASA is developing the experimental x57 maxwell to test the limits of propulsion of electric aircraft modified from a twin-engine technum p. -2006-t the final manned version of the x-57 will feature a distributed electric propulsion system consisting of 14 electric motors mounted on the leading edge of the wing, meaning we can design a wing that is only 40 percent of the area of ​​what a typical wing would have required for this type of airplane, we can make our wing very small and optimized for very efficient flight at high speed and use the distributed propulsion system to increase lift when the airplane is decelerating to land or be ejected. a takeoff, so we need to be able to distribute them in such a way that we get that high lift effect across the entire span of the wing, coming out of NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center, the two-seat aircraft hopes to achieve a It will gain three and a half times the aeropropulsive efficiency over its conventional counterpart and will be capable of reaching 100 miles of range at a cruising speed of 172 miles per hour, all with zero emissions in flight, considering that NASA is conducting battery research in other mission directions.

I was curious. If they had any plans to incorporate experimental high-energy-density battery technologies into the x-57, the answer might surprise you, but before we get into the battery system, it's necessary to better understand the methodology behind NASA's first x-plane. in more than two decades. is a technology demonstrator intended to improve our understanding of how electric propulsion can improve cruise efficiency and also provide certification data to establish commercial safety standards for the future of electric aviation. In this case, we chose to modify an airplane rather than build one from scratch because we wanted to learn these lessons as quickly as possible and if we had spent all of our time designing landing gear systems, seat rails, and instrument clusters, then we would have been We spent time working on high-performance engines, batteries and wings, so this approach to the project allowed us to really focus on the parts of the airplane we were trying to improve, which are the wing and power system, and keep the rest of the aircraft without having to spend too much time modifying it.

One of the most significant innovations in the project's power system is the high-lift engines. You can think of them almost like flaps on an airplane. The 12 fixed-pitch propellers are only needed at low speeds to produce drag once up at cruise. High lift propellers. It folds conformally along the nacelles and the two wingtip motors take over. Placing larger, more powerful cruise propellers on the wingtips offers favorable vortex interactions and can provide up to a five percent reduction in drag. The permanent magnet synchronous motors were supplied by Joby Aviation in California. -a China-based aerospace company that is developing its own electric vertical takeoff and landing air taxi, the crew system has two 72 kilowatt motors and eventually end up in the wing mod four on the wingtips and each of those engines inIt actually has two investors. systems that drive them for redundancy, so we have built the motors with a split set of windings;

They are actually two three phase motors interlocked on the same stator but they are electrically isolated and we have a dedicated inverter for each of those sets of windings and that goes back to a dedicated transmission line on the DC traction bus going back to our Battery system redundancy speaks to the high standards and practical objectives of the aeronautical research mission direction, for this reason the X-57 Maxwell aircraft will be powered by standard commercial lithium-ion battery cells. The pack consists of 16 battery modules arranged in an aluminum honeycomb architecture designed to prevent thermal runaway. Battery safety is one of the main challenges for electric aviation and an area to which NASA has devoted significant attention.

The battery pack will achieve a total energy capacity of 47 kilowatt hours at a weight of 860 pounds for an energy density of 121 watt hours per kilogram, well below the theoretical energy density of more than 400 watt hours per kilogram of experimental lithium oxygen batteries currently being investigated by NASA, we have battery experts at many of our centers, including the Glenn Research Center and the Johnson Space Center, who have helped the x-57 project, but for the x- 57 we really wanted to choose a commercial battery cell technology available on the market. and not invest in an experimental technology there because putting the engines in strange places on our plane is experimental enough for a project nasa doesn't like to leave much to chance because the final version of phase 4 of the x-57 will be piloted By a living human, all parts of the plane are subjected to extensive testing, including performing what is known as destructive inspection, essentially tearing each component down to its most basic elements.

God forbid, a weak magnet becomes the plane's 14 electric motors. It may seem a little obsessive, but this attention to detail is for good reason. Due to the nature of flight and the grim consequences of gravity, electric airplanes have a much lower fault tolerance than ground vehicles like cars. The program should be worth the money. worth the effort the x-57 maxwell is expected to achieve a 30% reduction in total operating costs, but the future of electric aviation is not limited to experimental government projects. There are already some fascinating flying machines in commercial operation and I was able to fly one in the twilight skies of the small town of Idolshina in 1980s Yukolavia, while private aviation was still illegal dark silhouettes fluttered on clear nights Slovenian locals They talked about bats, but these were just the motorized hang gliders and ultralights of Pipistrel's enigmatic founder, Ivo Boscorol Pipistrel, which means bat in the local dialect, eventually moved from experimental gliders to ultralight aircraft.

These curvaceous aircraft have gone on to set records the first woman to cross the Atlantic and Pacific in a light sport aircraft the first solo flight around the world in an ultralight and now the first commercially viable and available electric aircraft their first electrified offering was a powered glider pipstrell already offered the taurus in its line the first self-launched glider in the ultralight category, but electrified it with a pop-up propeller to produce the taurus electric powered gliders that provide the perfect platform for initial electrification efforts in the powered phase of the flight. It only needs to reach a high altitude before the engine shuts down and the pilot takes off in search of updrafts and thermals.

This form factor is extremely lightweight and has very low drag, allowing the use of small motors and batteries to meet the needs of the mission profile, this means the aircraft only needs a 4.75 kilowatt lithium polymer battery. hour and the entire aircraft can have an empty weight of just 675 pounds with a three-phase synchronous permanent magnet motor rated to provide 40 kilowatts peak or 30 kilowatts continuous. The electric version actually outperforms the now discontinued combustion engine option. The electric Taurus proved the technology was viable, and in 2011 the design was heavily modified to compete in NASA's Green Flight Challenge. The challenge was to fly 200 miles in less than two hours and achieve better results. 200 passenger miles per gallon NASA's custom-built Taurus G4 racer was created by connecting two fuselages with a 16-foot-long spar and mounting a 145-kilowatt brushless electric motor between the passenger capsules.

This design achieved 403 passenger miles per gallon at an average speed. of 107 miles per hour winning first place in the competition and taking home a prize of 1.35 million dollars they did not waste much time drinking lujanja and celebrating from here pipistrel they have continued with their developments the g4 was recognized as a test bed for high Powers electrical systems in future commercial electric aircraft Most pilot training flights last less than an hour, a mission profile that adapts well to the shorter duration of current battery electrical systems, thus arose the Alfa Electro, a Variant of the conventionally powered Alfa that has seen widespread use as a flight trainer.

Lessons learned eventually led to the development of the Vellus Electro with an all-new electric powertrain. In 2020, the Velos became the first EASA-certified electric aircraft. It is no small feat when new technology is incorporated into an aircraft and this opens the door to commercial use working with Slovenian electric motor specialists mrax and orisso. They have developed their own aircraft engine, the pipistrelle e811, and two 11 kilowatt hour battery packs. The entire system is now liquid cooled instead of using air cooling as in Siemens. Alpha Electro's lightweight motor and its controllers are separately certified for installation in other aircraft with a motor weight of 50 pounds and a controller weight of 17.8 pounds.

The custom-made battery packs are constructed from cylindrical cells that They use nickel, manganese and cobalt. Pipistrelle sites, based on lithium-ion chemistry, are beyond trainers and gliders. They are working on a hybrid and all-electric version of their high-speed 4-seat Panthera aircraft. They indicate that the cruising speed of the hybrid version will be approximately 20 knots slower than the piston engine version at around 204 miles per hour, this will be at maximum generator power and is comparable to the rated speed of the engine. piston to 55 pipstroller power, demonstrating a sensible approach to electrification by fusing new technology with existing airframes. to produce certifiable practical aircraft and I've found the perfect niche to get started, but Maverick needs the speed and buckle up your safety harness because one of the largest aerospace companies in the world is preparing to break the electric flight speed record that Rolls Royce It has been established.

At the forefront of arrow engines for over a hundred years and no strangers to the record books, the Rolls-Royce Eagle was the powerplant for the Vickers Vimy, the first aircraft to cross the Atlantic in 1919, but the Xcel is a acronym for accelerating the electrification of flight. seems to date back to the late 1920s when the Supermarines were chasing the Schneider Trophy for seaplane racing in those days, amphibians seemed to be the future of aircraft seen before World War II, long runways and well paved were as rare as an honest politician. an s6b super marine powered by a supercharged rolls-royce r engine that broke the world air speed record in 1931 reaching a speed of 407.5 miles per hour this racing series is one of the great drivers of aeronautical innovation, more notably the invention of radiatorless engine cooling by channeling coolant beneath the skin of the aircraft surface, presaging RR's tendency to seek novel solutions to high-performance aeronautical challenges in the tradition of its racing heritage.

Rolls-Royce is building the Excel, a sleek racing plane based on the Sharp airframe. Nemesis NXT which is capable of reaching a blistering top speed. The Excel is powered by three lightweight axial electric motors driving a single three-blade propeller in a conventional sport class format. The 82-pound Yasa 750R engines will deliver over 500 horsepower. To the Excel propeller the Supermarine of days gone by had to make do with highly inefficient fixed pitch propellers, but the Xcel's electronically controlled variable pitch propeller will allow engine torque and speed to be adapted on the fly. High power density axial motors operate at lower rpm than a conventional aircraft.

Stability and noise reduction The Xcel's high energy density package has enough power to fly 200 miles from London to Paris on a single charge, once again it is cooling that provides a major challenge in a unit with this much power, this Instead of a 2,800-horsepower V12, the 6,000 battery cells are crammed into the pilot's four and would melt your palette without a vigorous heat exchange campaign. Liquid cooling is used to transfer heat to radiators driven so smoothly into the fuselage that they are almost invisible. for naka duct intakes just behind the propeller, a popular choice for a low resistance duct inlet.

Also notice the bulge under the batteries where the radiators and pumps are housed, indicating that today's engineers have much less heat to deal with than the intrepid technicians who worked on the supermarine with system efficiency over 90 , we can expect that only 75 kilowatts of power will need to be transferred out of the aircraft as heat loss. In comparison, it is estimated that the Supermarine S6B had more than 750 kilowatts of excess heat to dissipate from its powerful but inefficient engine. Like the overall power of the Excel's powertrain, this allows engineers to get away with a relatively small radiator unit which can be seen on the dyno, the ion bird along with the large inverter and other electronics. of power that give a sense of scale to the ship's athleticism.

The record to beat is 213 miles per hour set by Siemens in 2017 in a modified Extra 300. project excel aims for a top speed of more than 300 miles per hour with its first aircraft the spirit of innovation that rolls-royce has Since Siemens' electronic aircraft unit was purchased, the broader purpose of project Excel is to bring together specialists in electric power and develop the technology and supply chains to adapt to future companies, as we have seen in the automotive world with companies competing for bragging rights and improvement. Up Cars Innovations learned on the track can translate into real-world performance improvements The goal is for optimizations made in high-performance electric powertrain design to reach broader commercial applications Racer is just the beginning for aviation electric for rolls-royce and only one As part of its R&D efforts at the small end of its spectrum, Rolls-Royce has developed an electric motor that can complement the power of a conventional piston engine in a configuration known as parallel hybrid.

In the H3PS they have modified a technum p2010 by exchanging its 180 horsepower motor for a 140 horsepower unit plus a 30 kilowatt electric motor to make up the difference when choosing the motors; It is rarely the cruising condition that dictates its maximum size. Efficiency gains of 10 to 15 percent can be achieved by using a smaller motor at a more efficient rate. power output and battery electrical power to complement high-energy flight modes, leveling up Rolls Royce combined one of its most successful small-shaft turbo engines, the m250, with its generator in a test of hybrid turboelectric systems high power, a turbine drives a generator that drives the engine without using batteries, of the order of 500 kilowatts to 1 megawatt of power, this is representative of the needs of a 4,000 kilogram commuter plane for about 8 passengers.

Rolls-Royce is paying close attention to the commuter aircraft market around the world. Electric format Rolls-Royce has partnered with Technum to produce the 11-passenger P-Vault designed for medium-range missions, from cargo to medical evacuation and commuter transport. Norwegian airline Wide Row is pushing to allow passengers to fly in a 2,026-passenger P-vault. Like you and me, many newContenders are entering the arena to try to meet this growing demand for electric airliners. An ambitious Israeli startup is building a futuristic, full-size airliner capable of astonishing range and has the kind of space-age look. As you might expect when imagining the future of electric aviation, more than half of all airline tickets sold today are for short regional flights, but the majority of these trips still use large, fuel-efficient jet planes. fuel and often have empty seats in recent years.

There has been an increase in the number of companies offering fractional ownership and on-demand charters for private jets, but pajamas are still prohibitively expensive for most people. If an electric plane could be built from scratch for these short trips, not only would it improve energy efficiency, it could potentially allow up to 80% cheaper airfare for you, the passenger, and this is exactly what aviation is trying to do. With the Alice, which is designed for use as an air taxi or business jet, by designing the plane around its novel power system, aviation projects staggering size. High performance with a range of 650 nautical miles and a cruising speed of 300 miles per hour for its nine passengers and two crew members.

The 820-kilowatt-hour lithium-ion battery at the heart of this plane weighs 8,200 pounds, about 60 percent of the plane's maximum. Takeoff weight power is distributed among three 280-kilowatt magnetic electric motors cleverly arranged in a thrust configuration to produce drag. A similar aircraft has a lift-to-drag ratio of about 16 to 1, but the Alice with its unconventional V-tail arrangement achieves a ratio of about 25 to 1 - a big jump in efficiency - the engine at the tip of the pointed tail of this aircraft provides what is known as boundary layer ingestion since the 1940s this technique has been applied to both ships and torpedoes imagine dragging a spoon through honey, the sticky honey The honey closest to the spoon is drags along its surface, while the honey furthest from the spoon remains stationary.

The same thing happens when the plane travels through the air. The most slowly moving layer of air closest to the surface of the aircraft, where the effects of viscosity are significant, is called the boundary. layer at the front of the aircraft, this boundary layer is very thin, but gradually thickens as the air passes along the aircraft and eventually passes into a turbulent layer where it becomes even thicker and has a great impact in the resistance to the design of the alice. is an attempt to delay the transition from laminar to turbulent as far back on the surface as possible; the propellant ingests this boundary layer.

The rear propeller sees slower moving air, which reduces the power required to maintain adequate thrust. This also absorbs some of the resistance. -induce a boundary layer outside the aircraft skin, re-energize the aircraft wake, then we have the external propellers, Alice can alter the power input to the engines with great precision, this allows differential thrust to be used to supplement the control surfaces with speed and sensitivity is not possible with conventional engines, it is even possible to rotate the propellers in the opposite direction to the wingtip vortices and mitigate the induced drag. Wingtip vortices exist at a point where high-pressure air beneath the wings wants to move and fill the low-pressure regions above. the wing, this point on the tips of the wings is where the high and low pressure regions meet.

A wide variety of wingtip devices installed on aircraft provide, rather crudely, a solid fence to minimize air wave around the wing, most of these devices are also designed to provide some lateral thrust. It drives these vortices further outward, giving the aircraft a longer effective wingspan and higher aspect ratio. Wings with a high aspect ratio generate less induced drag than short ones. Which explains the long wings of gliders, the alice cleverly uses its external propellers to generate a vortex swirl that equals the strength of the vortices of the wings. wings, this significantly reduces induced drag, increasing efficiency and range, what all this means is that the Alice only costs about two hundred dollars per hour to operate, while a comparable turboprop aircraft can cost between $1,200 and $2,000. per hour.

Aviation has already received more than 150 commercial orders at a price of 4 million per piece and certification is expected to be complete in 2023. Aviation engine supplier Magnets cut its teeth retrofitting existing aircraft with electric propulsion systems working in partnership with aerospace engineering firm aerotech they actually built the largest electric airliner ever flown the e-caravan a converted cessna 208b large caravan with a 750 horsepower engine successfully completed a 30 minute flight in 2020 Incredibly, this heavy, Reagan-era high-wing utility craft consumed less than six dollars in electricity during its maiden voyage. More back, Canada's Harbor Air made the news in 2019 with its claim to have operated the first commercial airliner flight. airline electric. operates short flights connecting the pacific northwest with a fleet of seaplanes its longest route from vancouver to seattle is approximately 120 miles as the crow flies an ideal electrification opportunity de havilland beavers are typically equipped with pratt whitney wasp jr engines that generate 450 horsepower teamed with magnex The airline has converted one of its beavers to all-electric power and intends to electrify its entire fleet, projecting operating cost savings of 50 to 80 percent.

Converting an existing airframe will make certification much easier, but the Beaver was designed in the 1940s with a piston engine in mind from the beginning. Aviation demonstrates the potential to reinvent aerospace design by putting electrification at the forefront. of its design thesis and not as an afterthought with precisely tuned compact electric motors the future of passenger aircraft is optimized and will follow true form-function principles Short-range commuter aircraft have their function, but what about with passenger planes for longer journeys on public transport? Major players have been exploring electrification for a while now and have created some radical designs.

Boeing has been working on its Sugarvault hybrid electric concept since 2006 in collaboration. With NASA, the project has morphed into the armor-reinforced transonic wing, a name that reflects the most obvious external design feature that allows for an abnormally high aspect ratio. Typically, wings are designed as cantilevers, meaning they are not supported outside the wing root, although this strut represents extra mass and airfoil drag this can be offset by the potential to reduce wing mass and allow the use of a very long wing to reduce induced drag, this concept is designed for 150-175 passengers, it seems that the main research effort is now directed at reducing fuel consumption and increasing aerodynamic efficiency instead of trying to incorporate electric propulsion, but okay This novel form factor is worth mentioning as an aviation breakthrough and a future candidate for electrification.

Meanwhile, Airbus has been working on its electronic fan concept since 2014, making the English's first electric crossover. channel a year after launch the all-electric twin-engine plane flew 46 miles in 36 minutes the e-fan 1.1 was an opening salvo the 60-kilowatt two-seater was the first variant of a research initiative on ducted electric fans with plans to scale to all The path to the 100-seat regional airliner, this project materialized as the e-fan x a hybrid electric flight demonstrator that swapped one of the four jet engines of an Avro RJ-100 with a 2-megawatt electric fan in collaboration with Rolls-Royce and Siemens. The series hybrid propulsion testbed used a 2.5 megawatt generator and a 2 megawatt battery pack weighing more than 2 tons, 33 times more powerful than its small predecessor.

Unfortunately, it never took off. The project was grounded in 2020, but the countless lessons learned will carry over to even more ambitious projects in Airbus' quest for zero-emission commercial flight. Let me introduce the elephant in the room. So far we have focused mainly on electric batteries, but there is a very light gas with strong implications for the future of aviation in September 2020. Airbus announced the zero e program with three conceptual designs and all run on hydrogen with respect to aeronautics . Hydrogen is interesting for several reasons: we can react hydrogen with oxygen and fuel cells to generate electricity.

A fuel cell is an electrochemical cell that converts chemical energy. in electricity through a couple of redox reactions fuel cells are not as efficient as batteries, the theoretical maximum efficiency is 85, but 50 is a more reasonable bet in real world applications, although fuel cells are less efficient , batteries are astonishingly heavy for their energy capacity, by contrast, hydrogen is ridiculously light, meaning it has a very high specific energy, 142 megajoules per kilogram, about three times that of jet fuel. The downside is that it takes up a lot of space as a gas, it only has 5 megajoules of energy per litre, but when liquefied the energy density doubles in the UK.

Xero Avia recently flew the world's first electric flight powered by a hydrogen fuel cell. A converted six-seat Piper M completed a takeoff and landing pattern in full traffic and landed running on hydrogen alone. The 15 minute flight might not leave. It's a surprise, but this is not a hobby project. Government-backed Zero Avia is targeting a 200-seat airliner with a range of 5,000 nautical miles by 2040 and believes hydrogen propulsion is the key to unlocking sustainable aviation and reducing overall travel costs by up to 50 percent. Currently, the overwhelming proportion of hydrogen production is done by splitting natural gas, an efficient industrial method that somewhat defeats the purpose because it emits CO2.

This is called gray hydrogen, but hydrogen can also be produced using electricity to break down water into oxygen and hydrogen gas. Top natural gas executives argued that electrolysis is a futile exercise because the energy has to come from somewhere, but this process can be done cleanly if the electricity comes from renewable sources like solar. This is called green hydrogen and is a key component of Zero Avia's renewable vision. hydrogen propulsion is not without difficulties hydrocarbon fuels are quite convenient, in particular kerosene, which is relatively difficult to ignite accidentally and is liquid at room temperature, hydrogen, on the other hand, is gaseous at room temperature and violently flammable, although hydrogen is the lightest element on the periodic table, high-pressure tanks. required for storage can become quite heavy, especially when reinforced for crash resistance.

Hydrogen molecules are so small that they actually sneak between the atoms of the storage tank materials and will leak slightly no matter how well contained. Hydrogen seeping into metals also causes brittleness, which can lead to Fuel cell splits are not the only way to use hydrogen; It is also possible to burn hydrogen in a conventional turbine engine to produce jet propulsion. Airbus believes that a combination of these two methods is its best chance to achieve an operational zero-emission commercial aircraft by 2035. Three Airbus 0e concepts use modified gas turbine engines, but also incorporate hydrogen fuel cells to create electrical power , resulting in a highly efficient hybrid electric propulsion system.

The first concept is a 200-passenger turbofan design with a range of more than 2,000 nautical miles. The sweep is slightly shallower. of the wings indicate that this aircraft will be designed to travel slightly slower than the cruising speeds of equivalent airliners which tend to operate around Mach 0.8 The turboprop will have an expected range of 1,000 nautical miles and will carry 100 Airbus passengers has also announced aDistributed distribution Capsule configuration: Each capsule has its own independent fuel cell propulsion system and contains a propeller, electric motors, fuel cells, power electronics, liquid hydrogen tank, cooling system and a set of backup equipment Designed to be modular and removable.

These capsules squeeze a lot of technology into a relatively compact format. package, finally the most radical of the designs, the combined wing body, the idea is to reduce skin friction by reducing the wetted area of ​​the aircraft and minimizing drag interference from the transition areas that we see in In conventional aircraft, such as those between the wing and fuselage or around the tailplane, the combined wing also aims to ensure that no part of the aircraft is aerodynamically useless as the entire body provides lift. Airbus estimates a 20% reduction in fuel consumption with this type of aircraft, typically combined wings work best for large aircraft and this one certainly fits the bill: it is expected to carry 200 passengers and fly over 2,000 miles nautical Hydrogen is not the only consumable fuel option for a hybrid system.

Petroleum-based aviation fuels may work as well as renewable biofuels, but hydrogen appears to be a versatile fuel. carbon contender and potentially affordable and by the way, although aviation went battery electric in Alice, they filed a patent for a hydrogen afterburner in 2018, so maybe they haven't ruled it out entirely despite the lack of optimism for pure battery electric flight from The biggest names in aviation, Los Angeles-based startup Ride Electric, are working on a 186-seat battery electric airliner with a 310-mile range scheduled to serve with operating partner Easyjet and hope to operate short-haul routes such as London to Paris by 2030.

An example of convergent evolution Wright Electric has also independently

arrived

at distributed propulsion as the ideal thrust configuration for its first passenger aircraft. The correct one will use about a dozen one and a half megawatt electric motors spread across the wing. Wright electric presents a unique forward-thinking thesis and appears to be strategically positioning itself in anticipation of revolutionary advances in battery technology that may eventually extend range to over 800 miles. When you look at these great electric airplane concepts, you may be thinking that it's a big surface area and it's getting a lot of sun, especially when flying above the cloud layer, electric airplanes and solar panels seem like a perfect combination in the sky, have you ever Have you ever wondered how to install solar panels on an electric airplane and why not all electric airplanes come equipped with solar panels?

For an elegant on-the-go charging solution until now, the constant theme has been the difficulties in achieving usable range and endurance with the co-founders of the Solar Boost project, Bertrand Picard and Andre Borschberg, setting their sights high on these goals with the goal of a complete circumnavigation using an all-electric aircraft powered solely by solar energy I have always been very inspired by all the pioneers of aviation this quest for innovation this quest to push the limits for me aviation is linked to the pioneering spirit and state of mind of exploration the original solar drive was successful in achieving long range flights, taking off under its own power and storing enough energy to fly through the night, it crossed continents and demonstrated that long range solar flight was possible, that such an aircraft was navigable and offered a tangible demonstration that existing technology was adequate to achieve this. seemingly impossible goals this is a great thing when it is electric you have your own energy source to power it you have the storage and you are completely autonomous which you will never be able to do if you have a heat engine that is only 27 percent efficient and you have to refuel the entire While you are always dependent on someone else to achieve the world record attempt, the Solar Drive 2 is designed with a similar design.

The wing is astonishingly long and measures 236 feet, which is more than seven times the wingspan of a Beechcraft Musketeer. This is partly for minimize induced resistance with a high aspect ratio of 19.7. The large wing area means wing loading is just eight kilograms per square meter compared to 125 kilograms per square meter for the Beechcraft Baron which has a similar maximum. the takeoff weight the low wing loading allows for much slower flight without stalling and the ability to fly slowly allows the design of a highly efficient craft with low parasitic drag during circumnavigation the cruising speed of the aircraft averaged only 47 miles per hour the large wing area provided plenty of room for photovoltaic cells the solar panels charged a lithium ion battery that would allow the plane to make it through the night the pilot would also climb during the day and use this extra height at night descending from 28,000 feet to approximately 5000 feet during the circumnavigation It was itself an epic adventure, it was divided into 17 legs, the longest taking more than five days to cover the Pacific from Japan to Hawaii.

After 21 days of flight, the plane returned to its departure airfield in Abu Dhabi to claim the world record for the first flight without fuel. aerial circumnavigation after the flight the work did not stop the purpose of the circumnavigation was not so much to enter the record books but to demonstrate the future of electric flight the possibilities of high-efficiency engineering and encourage public debate I would love to have electric flights airplanes battery powered, all fuel cell and hydrogen powered and this will probably be for medium to short full flights for very, very long distance flights. I think we need to provide for suborbital flights, which means you take a bit of a rocket and cut your plane's engines when you're at the top of the climb and then you just go parabolic suborbital and you can go half way around the world in an hour. and a half, do Paris, Sydney, New York, Singapore and with a great reduction in fuel consumption if you do that so you can see that there are still many things to invent if there is a man who knows a thing or two about how to get to outer space , is elon musk, will tesla or spacex ever build an electric plane according to elon?

It's simple you need to get high very quickly the higher the better Elon Musk proposes a supersonic vertical take-off and landing electric jet with gimbal thrusters that can change direction like a rocket. Imagine a lightweight flying wing design with high-energy-density batteries structurally integrated into the craft. It says that the battery cells would have to be as light as possible and have an energy density of at least 400 watt hours per kilogram with a high cycle life because the air is very thick at sea level and the density of the air decays exponentially elon argues the true benefits of electricity Aviation will take advantage of the low air resistance at high altitude, where you will go faster with the same amount of power as electric airplanes.

It really starts to make sense if you can climb to a high enough altitude where you can fly without using too much. energy, he further postulates that for the efficiency of electric airplanes it is necessary to have a high bypass ratio and move a large mass of air slowly with a large propeller in order to reduce the speed component of the kinetic energy. He argues that jet engines are designed inefficiently because they have to operate at a wide range of altitudes and the key advantage of the electric aircraft is that it does not ingest air, so it is not affected by the low air density of large aircraft. altitudes.

In the case of an electric plane Tesla, he doesn't rule it out completely, but says he has one too many on his plate right now to tackle the friendly skies. We are in the embryonic stages of electric planes with more than 200 electric plane programs and development around the world this list was simply a sampling of promising programs, although currently limited by the weight-to-energy ratio of batteries in an application where mass is mission critical the industry is positioned to make huge gains once it is achieved a breakthrough in high-density, high-energy battery technology we will continue to see improvements in smaller, limited-range electric aircraft driven by efficiency advances in the engine Meanwhile, we will see large, long-range aircraft adopt some form hybrid power system with existing combustion engines, hydrogen being a versatile and economical competitor for long or high-speed flights.

Electric power is a challenge, but it can certainly be used to provide a boost to smaller turbofans and it may very well be clear that electric aircraft are on the horizon. If you are interested in delving deeper into some of the concepts we present in this video, a great first step is to learn the fundamentals of electricity and magnetism. does a great job of taking complicated science and breaking it down into bite-sized pieces with fun and challenging interactive explorations, mastering concepts, and building a knowledge base so you can develop your intuition to better understand the fundamentals of these innovative technologies that I've taken on. brilliant courses on electricity, magnetism and solar energy and I was impressed with how well they structure their lessons with clever analogies, examples and quizzes to test your knowledge. shiny offers a wide range of other content and topics, from mathematical foundations to quantitative finance, from scientific thinking to special topics. relativity from programming with Python to machine learning for all those who believe that the future will be electric, go to shiny.org electric Future and register for free and also the first 200 people who access that link will get a 20 discount on the subscription annual premium.

Showcase cutting-edge sustainable technology. If you enjoyed this video, please give it a like and if you believe in an electric future, please subscribe to our channel. You might be interested in watching one of these videos below. Thanks for watching and let the volts be with you.