Electric or hybrid air transportation developments

[California98Civic]

There have been a few threads over time on electric airplanes, usually on really specific technologies or projects only. Recently, freebeard posted on the demise of the Airbus/RR electric-hybrid testbed and remarked he could not find a general thread for it. I am curious about this topic, so I thought I would create a general thread on it and see if the thread "takes off" .... a place to aggregate and discuss news and developments.

A "government support" type story about a NASA spinoff project due to fly in 2020:
https://spinoff.nasa.gov/Spinoff2019/t_1.html

A "local guy" story about an EV Aircraft company:
https://www.wamc.org/post/ev-aircraf...ies-burlington

A "future vision" kind of piece:
https://www.verdict.co.uk/urban-air-...ure-honeywell/
Apparently, we might get to be The Jetsons someday.

SEE ALSO: freebeard's original post on the Airbus/RR testbed's demise:
https://ecomodder.com/forum/showthre...tml#post622621

If someone finds a thread that I missed, let me know. I hope the mods will just merge this into that if it exists...

[cRiPpLe_rOoStEr]

I guess an eventual commercially-viable hybrid aircraft powerplant will be premiered in some military application, as most of them remain using electric starters unlike airliners which now feature air starters more often. But anyway, it's likely to be dependent on the development of solid-state batteries which might be more suitable to the wider range of atmospheric pressures and the faster changes on this parameter they would underwent on flight.

[California98Civic]

Originally Posted by cRiPpLe_rOoStEr

I guess an eventual commercially-viable hybrid aircraft powerplant will be premiered in some military application, as most of them remain using electric starters unlike airliners which now feature air starters more often. But anyway, it's likely to be dependent on the development of solid-state batteries which might be more suitable to the wider range of atmospheric pressures and the faster changes on this parameter they would underwent on flight.

Solid state but not the ever ellusive graphene battery?

[cRiPpLe_rOoStEr]

Originally Posted by California98Civic

Solid state but not the ever ellusive graphene battery?

President Jair Bolsonaro used to talk a lot about graphene here in Brazil, but the local media insisting on trying to create scandals out of nowhere and now the Covid-19 have been more recurrent topics.

[redneck]

.

Here’s a development...

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zon...nt-is-operable




>

[freebeard]

Recently, freebeard posted on the demise of the Airbus/RR electric-hybrid testbed and remarked he could not find a general thread for it.

I was looking for that thread but found this one first.

arstechnica.com: Microwave thruster makes for clean-burning jet
Air-burning plasma thruster may be competitive with jet engines.

The discussion on Slashdot (here: science.slashdot.org: Scientists Create a Prototype 'Air Plasma' Engine That Works Without Fossil Fuels (sciencealert.com) ) focuses on scalability and missing data points.

Originally Posted by q4Fry ( 1322209 )

Thanks for the link. I found the next two paragraphs to be interesting, too. Emphasis is mine.

The question is one of scaling. At the air flow rates (around 1m3/h) and microwave powers (less than 1kW) that the researchers tested, everything scaled very nicely. But the airflows are in the region of about 15,000 times lower than those for a full-sized engine. The thrust also has to scale by about four orders of magnitude (meaning the power does, too). Extrapolating linear trends over four orders of magnitude is a good way to be disappointed in life.

I also believe that the warning signs are already in the paper. If you look carefully, there are some missing data points. For instance, at the highest microwave power, only lower flow rates are tested, while for low microwave power, all flow rates are tested. That seems like an odd omission. I suspect the plasma is not stable at high flows and high powers.

Not nearly as interesting as the Navy patents.

[cRiPpLe_rOoStEr]

I would like to see how something analogue to the Toyota HSD system could replace the reduction gear fitted to the GENx engine.

[freebeard]

Did you follow the links?

Does that hybrid drive aircraft compare with a submarine-to-aerospace design envelope?

[cRiPpLe_rOoStEr]

Originally Posted by freebeard

Did you follow the links?

Err... No

Does that hybrid drive aircraft compare with a submarine-to-aerospace design envelope?

Everything can be compared, even if the template is not the most suitable for a fair comparison.

[California98Civic]

So, this NASA project seems highly impractical for NASA's purposes. Why are they developing a pilotted recreational aircraft or puddle-jump tourism plane? This will never fly to Mars. ...it must be about technology development along the way, but then why build it as a small, pilotted passenger plane?
https://insideevs.com/news/406640/el...axwell-images/