Boeing Working on Fuel Cell Aircraft

"Boeing is working with development partners on a fuel cell-based small aircraft. It seems like a logical use of the technology. Now if they can come up with a quiet, personal-sized VTOL craft a la Paul Moller's Skycar (which is anything but quiet), we'll really have something." From the article "A Boeing research director was quoted as saying, "While Boeing does not envision that fuel cells will provide primary power for future commercial passenger airplanes, demonstrations like this help pave the way for potentially using this technology in small manned and unmanned air vehicles."

Comments

Re:More kinetic energy is bad

[Loke the Dog]

And automobile accidents is actually a big deal today, so I guess they were right too.

It's not the engines which are noisy

[M0b1u5]

It's not the engines which are noisy on Moller's ultra-dangerous thing (I refuse to dignify it with the title "car" or "aircraft" as it is neither) it's the fans/propellers which make all the noise. You simply can't move lots of air without making a hell of a racket.

See: Overclocked PCs, Helicopters, Jet Engine, extractor fan, air conditioner, Vacuum cleaner...

It wouldn't matter if Moller's thing had fuel cells - it would just as noisy.

Re:It's not the engines which are noisy

[M0b1u5]

Acoustic optimisation can onyl get you so far. In other words, you reduce fans/propellors from "an ear damaging roar" to simply "extremely fucking loud". There's only so much you can do to quieten fans;

You can get cute and use TMD (Tip Magnetic Drive) fan blades, which have no ends (its thought that tip vortex at the end of fan blades is responsible for much of the noise associated with fans and blades) and you could spend millions designing the most efficient blades possible.

Hell, you could even bet that in a few years the next generation of memetic polyalloys (T1000 et al) or "memory metals" will even allow the actual blades to change shape depending on their rotational speed, thus reducing noise still further.

But the fact remains, on a 2000 KG car, you need at least 2000 KG of vertical thrust to keep it in the air, and 2000 KG of thrust is a LOT. Are you seriously suggesting that fan blades can be made as quiet as say - a 5-litre V8 car at 6000 rpms? No way. Not gonna happen. Not ever.

Unless some way can be made to shift large amounts of air, efficiently, with no blades at all, then the Moller thing will never be anything more than a fucking dangerous, extremely noisy experimental demonstrator.

I'm still hanging out for effective anti-gravity. After all, it's such a weak force, that 2 AA batteries should be powerful enough to keep your car airborn for a year or so. Then all you need is some way to move it about, and you only need one engine for that - so it'd be much quieter.