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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."
I want my flying car by 2015.
The Skycar is vaporware. It has been for the last 30 years. Please don't use the Skycar as a benchmark for anything but hype and failure.
One of the biggest problems with smaller aircraft is reliability. Simply put, piston engines are not as reliable as jet engines. They must be rebuilt every 2,000 hours of flight under the best circumstances. And, with smaller planes at slower speeds, jets just don't make sense.
Turboprop engines are a good middle ground for mid-sized planes starting at the 12-seat size or so, but are very expensive for the smallest aircraft. (2 and 4 seaters)
Electric motors, other the other hand, can be incredibly reliable. If designed for it, they have just a single moving part, and can run continuously, 24x7x365 for many years without issues. This kind of reliability in a small plane would be just incredible!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
That's way too much kinetic energy in the hands of John Q. Public.
I believe that's what they said about the automobile 100 years ago.
-R
Their heads are in the clouds on this one. This project will never fly. I bet it stalls and they never get it off the ground. It simply flies in the face of reason. That said, the sky's the limit when it comes to technological fantasy.
And automobile accidents is actually a big deal today, so I guess they were right too.
I know nothing about engines, so can someone answer some basic questions for me? Wouldn't a fuel-cell engine be essentially an electric engine? Would it be quieter than a gasoline engine? More reliable? Would there be any odor? If so, they would be ideal for ultralights:
I am a hang glider pilot, and I would love to have a small engine for it. There are several manufacturers who make small engines for them, they are loud, stinky, gasoline engines. Most of them only hold 1-2 gallons of fuel, which is plenty for this type of flight. Wouldn't a fuel-cell engine do the trick?
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.
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
Are the power to weight ratios comparable to current internal combustion engines?
You probably mean the external combustion engine, also known as the jet engine. Only small airplanes use pistons and such. And the answer is: of course not. This is yet another PR stunt aimed at the Gasoline Is Eeeeeeevil ninnies of the world who failed freshman chemistry.
If not, what about fuel cell powered dirigibles?
I don't think the problem with dirigibles is how to power them. I think the problem is that there's just about zero demand for a transport service that's about as slow as a ship or train but neither as efficient nor as reliable.
A big cargo ship carrying 70,000 tons of cargo can cruise at 15 knots with its 50,000 HP engines running at 80%. The EPA helpfully estimates big marine engine fuel consumption as about 250 grams per kilowatt-hour, which lets you work out that a cargo ship consumes about 4 grams of fuel per ton of cargo per kilometer traveled.
Four locomotives pulling a hundred-car freight train at 60-80 MPH, with each car carrying 100 tons of cargo, will burn about 7.5 gallons each per mile. That works out to 7 grams of fuel per ton of cargo per kilometer traveled.
There's no way any vehicle that flies can ever come close to that kind of fuel efficiency. So who would want cargo delivery that's just as slow, but much more expensive?
That 2000lb aircraft is going to have two or three times the horizontal velocity of that truck, and an additional vertical velocity component when it impacts the ground.
Given the relation p = m v, you do the math on that, and couple it with the fact that no non-military building I know of is built to withstand impacts from above. Anyone in a home or apartment that's hit by a falling, fast-moving aircraft is dead meat.
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
...or some kind of powered trampoline.
This isn't totally humorous, incidentally. Think of aircraft carriers. You can achieve very short take-off distances without putting the giant (noisy) vertical-flight machinery on your aircraft -- because you can just leave it on the ground behind you. But you must then accept the fact that you can only launch in certain places.
Still, I'd bet there's a market for a cheap skycar that can only launch at certain public facilities but can land nearly anywhere.
Go here and look at the nice picture on the right-hand side. Notice that the combustion takes place in the exhaust stream, heading out of the engine. Not inside a cylinder.
Sounds like someone failed basic understanding-of-how-things-work class.
Oh I agree, definitely.
Huh. Haven't heard of that before. That's pretty unusual, no?
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
And automobile accidents is actually a big deal today, so I guess they were right too.
Considering that 3000 people die per day from car accidents around the world, what we have is a disaster of the proportion of september 11, done daily.
Generally speaking, most countries seek to blame the individual driver. Most airlines seek to fix the system. And when you look at what they have had to do to make planes safe, its pretty clear that few of us really have a right to lift a few tons of metal into the air over any place that people are.
The real question that society needs to ask is how much it can justify letting so many people drive cars right now.
Just some food for thought. Wont really matter too much anyway, the oil will probably get too expensive before many people can afford this sort of technology. We will need what is left to fly the efficient, big planes.
And no, I would be bitterly opposed to people having flying cars, even if the technology made it possible.
My 2c
Michael
There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.
You mean hydrogen... helium is incredibly stable and does not combust at any temperature we would consider to be "normal" outside of a dying star.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
Soon, the complete idiots who build their homes next to airports and then complain about all the noise will have another thing to whine about.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
I guess weight is the major obstacle at the moment.
It is. Current (pardon the pun) PEM fuel cell technology typically uses platinum, AFAIK. Stacks are heavy. The Ballard Mark 1030 provides about 78 Watts per liter of unit volume and 66 Watts per kilogram. The Ballard Mark 902, which is used in several fuel cell cars and buses, is much more powerful at 1133 Watts per liter of unit volume and 885 Watts per kilogram, but it's heavy (96 kilos, over 211 pounds). Note that neither of these devices weights include the power conditioning and management systems, fuel handling, etc. The entire integrated stack is much heavier when you're considering a "hydrogen in, electricity out" system. Furthermore, if you're not supplying fuel from a bottle of anhydrous hydrogen (a strange phrase if I've ever heard one), you've got a fuel reformer to take into account, which is one more package of weight and one more power draw on the system.
Having said all that, I think this is a great idea and hope it succeeds. From what I know (or think I know), so-called "ultracapacitors" are much lighter and more responsive than Lithium Ion batteries, and other slow-and-steady power generation systems, such as zinc-air batteries, might be able to back them up with better success.
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
Battery energy density is finally getting good enough for this sort of thing. Electric cars with real performance are at last possible, although the trunk full of laptop batteries still costs too much.
For aircraft, the price point is higher, so this could work. There are lots of little electric-powered unmanned aircraft around, from toys to small military recon units. An outfit called Aviation Tomorrow was making noise about an electric-powered kitplane back in 2002-2005. They got to the point where they'd announced the first flight test in 2005, then disappeared. What seems to have gone wrong is that they originally planned a battery powered plane, which would have worked, then switched to hydrogen and Ballard fuel cells, which didn't.
The embarrassing fact about the fuel cell industry is that almost nobody is shipping a usable product. It's still all prototypes. Five years ago, Ballard was about to launch a commercial product with Coleman, but they couldn't make it work well, and Coleman backed out. APC supposedly sells a fuel cell product for server backup power, but it doesn't really seem to be installed in any quantity. (For one thing, it requires chilled water for cooling, which is a real problem if you need power to chill the water.)
Flying Cars + GPS + central redundant navigation systems
We'll have flying cars. People just wont be allowed to control them themselves, except for maybe an emergency landing mode.
As a bonus, we could call the central control system 'Skynet'
"Open the pod by doors, Hal" > "I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave" sudo "Open the pod bay doors, Hal" > alright