Battery-Powered Plane Taxis, Set To Fly Soon

bigdaddy writes "'WORCESTER - At 10:01 a.m. yesterday, Cary Dillman fastened her shoulder belts in the pilot's seat of a sleek twin-seat airplane, closed the cockpit canopy, and taxied into aviation history sounding - in her words - "like a sewing machine." Dillman was piloting the first conventional airplane powered by electricity.' How cool is that! Full details in this story."

Comments

Re:non polluting

[Ismilar]

No, because it depends where the power is generated.
If it's here where I am, most (if not all) of my electricity comes from hydro and nuclear. If it's in the US, it'll likely be fossil fuels, but since it's produced in large quantities it will be less fossil fuels than what the plane would produce...

So it isn't completely 'non polluting', but it's still much better than a regular plane.

Batteries can't beat combustion

[mc6809e]

Energy Density of Some Materials (Wh/kg)

Hydrogen ---------------> 38,000
Gasoline ---------------> 14,000
Compressed Air ---------> 2,000 / m^3
Flywheel, Fused Silica -> 900
Hydrostorage -----------> 300 / m^3
Flywheel, Carbon Fiber -> 200
Zinc, Al Air Batteries -> 200
Lithium Iron Batteries -> 150
Nicad Batteries --------> 55
Flywheel, Steel --------> 50
Lead Acid Batteries ----> 40

Batteries just can't compete on weight with other sources of energy. Looking at the above table, we see that the best batteries (Zinc Air with sacrificial anode) provide just 1/70th the energy kg for kg that gasoline provides. Electric vehicles seem to be a dead-end to me. A lot of energy is spent just moving the batteries themselves from place to place. The physics are strongly against battery-powered vehicles.

A much better approach would be to determine how we can produce gasoline from CO2 and H2O or coal, using some other source of energy to get the job done. It's already possible to produce natural gas this way.