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Solar Plane Breaks Endurance Record
calmond writes with this excellent snippet from CNET News: "QinetiQ Group PLC claimed Sunday that its propeller-driven aircraft called Zephyr flew for 83 hours and 37 minutes non stop, more than doubling the official world record set by Northrop Grumman's Global Hawk in 2001. The Zephyr is much different from the Global Hawk, which is about the size of a fighter and requires runway for taking off and landing. Zephyr, on the other hand, is an ultra-lightweight carbon-fiber aircraft that weighs less than 70lbs and is designed to launch by hand. The little aircraft flies on solar power generated by amorphous silicon arrays covering the aircraft's paper-thin wings. It is powered day and night by rechargeable lithium-sulfur batteries that are recharged during the day using solar power."
Manned aircraft still have that record beat. Humm several days in an airplane... What fun.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
... the leg room in first class sucks.
Have gnu, will travel.
Very interesting might I add. But the suggested applications of such a plane / technology seem to be far fetched. From TFA:
Telecom or science equipment tend to be bulky and heavy. Even with the size reductions of the equipment we witness today, it's still big... too big for the payload of such an ultra-light aircraft.
Furthermore, theseà systems require power; power you either need to carry with you (fuel cells, batteries, etc.) or produce with solar cells. As most of the power from the cells is probably used for flight systems, not much would be left for payload powering, cooling, heating, etc.
The idea is nice, but for me, at this stage, it's nothing more than a toy to get credits for breaking records. Not a serious attempt to develop a usable platform. The potential isn't that great.
If it was that easy, they could just go to one of the poles where the sun never sets for half a year. Though I suppose the ambient temperature and low angle might be a letdown. On an equally unrealistic note, to travel with the sun at equator it'd have to do 40000km in 24 hours = 1667km/hour. Yes, we can make planes that fast OR planes that lightly glide using solar power but I'm pretty sure we won't get both at once.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7577493.stm
If I get to set my own rules, I can break records, too.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Seems that the path is not that simple. If I start at daylight and travel to the pole it will be 1/4 circumference and it would be morning again on the other side. So more like 400kph?
Sulfur is a relatively cheap material, so lithium-sulfur batteries have the potential to be less expensive than other battery types. With a lower starting cost to manufacturers, lithium-sulfur batteries could save consumers money. There is also a possible cost savings because lithium-sulfur batteries tend to provide much longer charges than lithium ion batteries. With double the lifetime or greater, you might be able to get by with a single lithium-sulfur battery for your laptop or rechargeable hand tool. Another reported advantage of lithium-sulfur batteries is their ability to work well in very cold weather. www.wisegeek.com
Nope. The whole thing was built only to be mentioned on Slashdot.
Like a paper airplane? But bigger?
. o O ( TwO hEaDs ArE mOrE tHaN oNe... )
Actually, it doesn't need to be daytime for it to operate, hence how it was able to stay airborne for 83 hours. It uses high capacity batteries to get through the night.
Amnesty International
as your own cite says: the FAI "sanctions all record attempts." It's not a record, especially since they apparently self-officiated.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/10/1917254
Solar Craft Flies Through Two Nights
Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday September 10 2007, @03:43PM
from the nasa-awash-with-envy dept.
Power Technology
An anonymous reader writes "A solar-powered, unmanned craft has flown for 54 hours -- a record for both unmanned aerial vehicles and solar craft. None before has managed to store enough solar energy to fly through more than one night. There is also a video showing the 18m carbon fiber wing craft being launched."
If my hunch is correct, then QinetiQ isn't very upset by not being listed as a world-record-breaker with this flight. Qinetic is a military contractor. Unless I'm completely mistaken, this plane being constructed with so much carbon fiber, wouldn't it have a very small (perhaps non-existent) radar signature? I'm sure it could carry a small payload, like reconnaisance cameras, for instance? All that plus no need to refuel, and I'd say that the military would be very interested in contracting QinetiQ to build a fleet of these for them. I'd also imagine that you could include a satellite uplink to the payload, and never have to even have the thing land in order to download it's recorded recon data.
But it did come down, which means, some resource got drained... Which one? The batteries, which may have been only partially recharging during the day, is one possible explanation....
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
i never want to meet the man who launches this aircraft by hand
I think the claim to have beaten the Global Hawk by 2x is a bit misleading - it implies a doubling of existing capabilities. In fact, it only UNOFFICIALLY doubles an OFFICIAL record, which itself is not the longest flight recorded by any means. In 1989 a Boeing UAV named Condor flew over 58 hours, and had a design endurance of 80 hours. Okay, they never claimed it as an official record, but it was still a valid flight, just like this was.
Here's an interesting video:
http://video.aol.com/video-detail/boeing-condor-uav/4285692709
And some facts:
http://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/factsheets/factsheet.asp?id=7988
Granted, the Zephyr is theoretically limited only by the service life of its electrical components - it could stay up until something broke or wore out. But please, let's use real facts here.
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
See the RQ14 Dragon Eye. It's a Marine Corp UAV. You launch it with a bungee cord. I imagine if your arm was strong enough, you really could launch this one like a paper airplane too.
I was of the hope that I would know how its flight ended. Sadly, the entire story does not mention this. Anyone in the know about how this magnificent plane's flight ended...or did it crash?
Or why didn't they just let it continue flying after all it had an endless supply of "juice."
QinetiQ CIA link
QinetiQ, the British defence and security technology company that was spun out of the Ministry of Defenceâ(TM)s research laboratory, has appointed George Tenet, 53, former head of the CIA in America, a non-executive director. The company hopes to develop closer links with the US intelligence establishment.
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
... especially the one that says the FAI is the authority?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
... until Anonymous Coward decides to break it.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
But it did come down, which means, some resource got drained... Which one? The batteries, which may have been only partially recharging during the day, is one possible explanation....
The first people to fly a solar-powered plane through the night, Tom Gage and his team at AC Propulsion, flew for 48 hours...and could have probably flown forever -- the resource that was drained was the on-ground pilots.
The plane was flown to use thermals as much as possible during the day, but it was tiring work.
Anyway, after two days, and with a battery charge higher than what they started at, they figured that they had made their point.
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
I'm surprised it wasn't tried nearer the summer solstice, around the 3rd week of June, for the longest daylight.
As explained in the BBC article, flying over one of the poles is not necessary to fly forever. This team is now working on a defense project codenamed Vulture to extend their design to be able to fly non-stop for 5 years on any spot on the Earth's surface. Although they don't mention why Zephyr couldn't fly more than 84 hours, presumably it was either because it wasn't able to recharge its batteries fast enough during daytime, or they voluntarily stopped the experiment after 84 hours. In any case it looks like their design is not far from being able to "fly forever".
This would be cool if the end application wasn't to kill people more effectively.
Perhaps for military use it's desirable to fly that low, but another way to get a solar plane flying forever is to get it light enough and get the sink rate low enough (1 foot/second) that it can glide all night (100000 feet -> 40000 feet) and still be in the lower stratosphere by sunrise. That way you don't need batteries, and you'll always be above the clouds and weather.
A plane designed for this will be flimsy and fly extremely slowly near ground (slower than walking speed), so it'd have to be launched and retrieved during calm weather, but once up, there would be very little to go wrong - at most latitudes it could circle in one spot indefinitely.
Anyone who writes that the Global Hawk is the size of a fighter has never seen one in person. The damn thing is HUGE. The wingspan is even greater than that of a U-2. It's an awesome plane with some serious potential.
Solar planes are going to reduce the need for satellite and satellite launches. That may lower the cost for some services, but it will also mean that there's less interest in commercial uses of space.
Anyone else thinking "plane of the ecliptic" when you read the headline?
Don't confuse a "feat" with a "record". Feats are what people do. Records are feats that can be proven to have happened. If an achievement is not properly documented, there's no way to know for sure whether it was done.
So it's not whether or not the feat was surpassed, it's whether the feat was surpassed in a way that can be verified. I can say to you that I've got a cure for cancer, or tell you that I can run 30 MPH barefoot, but neither claim means anything there's some verification of the process - some official body (EG: the American Medical Association in the United States) has performed testing to some standard process to verify that the cancer cure I claim actually works at least most of the time. (In medicine, almost nothing works 100% of the time, not even aspirin)
You and I have no particular doubt that they flew the time they're claiming. But if it has not passed the most widely recognized process for validating this record, the RECORD still stands, and will stand until the proper process has been followed to record the fact that the old record has been broken.
However, they have a plan, which entails aircraft like this flying for MONTHS ON END. So they probably don't much care about documenting the record, since their numbers are likely to improve dramatically over the next year or so. Why go through the effort of documenting what is, for them, a rather minor, incremental step, solely to prove a record?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
With that kind of range, the non-military applications are quite exciting. A solar powered aircraft can be used as a relay, just like a communications satellite, but with much lower latency. Rather than building towers on the ground, we can start popping them in the air, where they have line of sight to a much larger area. This would be a huge boost for telecommunications in third-world countries, where a few thousand of them could be deployed in a mesh network covering an entire area and only needing a small number of exit points to get to the rest of the Internet. Unlike fixed towers, they can dynamically rearrange their configurations so that large collections of devices are covered by more base stations.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Do the math... I doubt your ultralight would ever make it to the necessary altitude. 12 Hours X 60 Minutes X 60 Seconds = 43,200 seconds to climb 100,000 feet... Your plane would need to climb at greater than 2.31 feet per second to make it to 100,000ft in a 12 light cycle. Tough to do with a plane that flys at a walking pace.
The plane was made and flown by QinetiQ, the semi-commercial part of the UK's military R&D. They are building the plane for the US military.
They were probably quite happy to let the world know their plane is sort of the best you can get, because they are expected to make money these days and are looking for business.
On the other hand it's military, they are hoping to sell it to the US military, so they probably didn't want to give all the secrets away. I can't see them letting some "sports federation" official onto Area 51 or wherever just to confirm how high it went. Not til they've sold a few and worked out the next version any way.
"The Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona was an appropriate setting for Zephyr's world beating flight as many landmark aviation developments have taken place there in recent years," Simon Bennett, managing director of QinetiQ's Applied Technologies business, said in an announcement. "In addition to setting a new unofficial record, the trial is a step towards the delivery of Zephyr's capability for joint, real-time, battlefield persistent surveillance and communications to forces in the field at the earliest opportunity." [emphasis mine]
All of a sudden solar is big ;) zdnet just had an article about new solar panels and hempstead ny just got a new solar house:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6PJnYMXgwQ
*shrug* easy mistake to make I guess; at my last job we evaluated many tiny GPS receiver modules, and at least one of them was made by Qinetiq.
2.31ft/s (0.7m/s) for a 10kg plane is 70 watts. Add in a foot per second to cancel out drag and you're at 100 watts. Such a 10kg plane could have upwards of 500 watts of solar panels (and produce a good fraction of that during the day).
First off, if you've watched electric RC gliders, you'd know that optimal glide speed and climb speed are very different. Second, air pressure at 40000 feet is less than a quarter of sea level air pressure, meaning those speeds would be at least twice as fast as they would be at sea level.
They tried it with Sunrise and Sunrise II back in the 70s (and that's where I'm getting the 10kg and 500 watt figures from). Supposedly, command and control problems prevented them from getting above 20000 feet. I expect those problems could be easily solved today.
....Sir Branson...had to be involved with this in some way....Makes you wonder where Mr. Fosset is....
Joe Investor