Electric Aviation

The Txchnologist, the GE-sponsored online magazine, wraps up its aviation month with a week devoted to space travel, including this far-out feature on the E-Plane.

Confronted with substantially the same environmental mandates that prompted the auto industry to develop electric cars, the aviation industry has begun gearing up to do the same. That’s right, electric airplanes are coming.

EADS (European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company), the parent firm of Airbus, for example, has been flying a battery electric-powered ultralight aircraft for the last year, and at the recent Paris Air Show it introduced a series-hybrid motor glider as well as an ambitious future concept for an all-electric, 50-seat passenger plane powered by superconducting drive motors.

Last fall, Boeing released details of a NASA-funded effort to use a hybrid battery-electric/gas turbine propulsion system to power a future 737-class commercial transport. A few months earlier, at the 2010 Oshkosh event, both Cessna and Sikorsky announced plans to fly some time this year electric-powered demonstrators-respectively, a light plane and a light helicopter.

A Slow Transition To Electric Aviation

Aviation experts say that ultra-green aviation technology will take a good deal of time. The necessary technical advances are still speculative. On the other hand, they add, aerospace engineers can see the path to eventual success, if not the actual stepping stones along the way.

“Next-generation aircraft will feature more and more electronics,” said Dale Carlson, Executive for Advanced Engine Systems at GE Aviation, but “the last thing to convert to electric power will be the power plant. This is because the batteries that would be required to supply the amount of electricity for large commercial aircraft, weigh a lot.” The power capacity of battery technology, he continued, would have to grow by “at least a factor of four before we are near where we need to be to accomplish this.” Larger electric airliners would need hundreds of thousands of horsepower.

Game Changer

Still, many researchers can already envision how the switch to electric will take place. Electric propulsion will be a “game-changer and transform aeronautics in the next 20 to 30 years,” predicted Mark Moore, an aerospace engineer and conceptual design expert at NASA Langley Research Center.

The first breakthroughs will occur with small aircraft, according to Moore, perhaps personal air vehicles that could replace the car on some trips. He envisions electric-powered unmanned aerial vehicles first transitioning from military to civilian use, followed in time by much more environmentally responsible commercial transport planes. Carlson speculated that at some point “we’ll probably see a hybrid engine that combines fuel cells with turbines-where the turbine technology would be there for takeoff and the fuel cells utilized during cruise.”

Steven Ashley is a contributing editor at Scientific American magazine, where he writes and edits articles on general science and technology topics. Ashley’s work has been published in Popular Science, MIT’s Technology Review and Physics Today, among others. Source: www.gereports.com