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NASA Offers $1.5 Million For 200MPG Aircraft
coondoggie writes to mention that NASA's Green Flight Challenge is offering up to $1.5 million for an aircraft that can hit 200 passenger miles per gallon while maintaining 100 mph on a 200 mile flight. "The Challenge is intended to bring about the development and convergence of new technologies and innovations that can improve the community acceptance, efficiency, door-to-door speed, utility, environmental-friendliness, affordability and safety of future air vehicles, CAFÉ stated. Such technologies and innovations include, but are not limited to, bio-fueled propulsion, breakthroughs in batteries, motors, fuel-cells and ultra-capacitors that enable electric-powered flight, advanced high lift technologies for very short takeoff and landing distances, ultra-quiet propellers, enhanced structural efficiency by advances in material science and nano-technology and safety features such as vehicle parachutes and air-bags."
Newton's laws of motion are now null and void, What do I win again?
Can I get a CAR that will get half the miles per gallon at half the speed?
I guess really I can, if I load three other people into the car, it's not too hard. Nevermind.
Qxe4
Why even offer the money? Just announce the contest and dangle some valuable space-time to the winner. 1.5 million is a new toilet.
Where can I collect my reward?
NASA seems to have forgotten how much aircraft cost.
I mean, the aircraft itself might be worth more than that off a production line once it's been invented.
That's like offering someone $1000 for the process of turning lead into gold. I don't know that anyone would take such a low amount seriously.
The Airbus A-380 gets roughly 100 passenger-miles per gallon, cruising substantially faster and further. Surely with only enough fuel for a short 100 mile flight, no cargo, you could cram twice as many people in it, and easily get your 200 passenger-miles per gallon. Of course, chartering one, might cost more than the prize is worth...
Surely a company that could build such a miraculous machine would make a lot more on its own.
Such technologies and innovations include, but are not limited to, bio-fueled propulsion...
Take a Diamond aircraft and put old Wesson oil in it and Wammo! $1.5 million?!
Their aircraft seam perfect for using bio-fuels. Sure, you'll have to tweak it a bit. No problem.
Not 200 Miles Per Gallon. 200 passenger miles per gallon.
Where's my blimp. And please point me to the nearest jetstream.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
NASA doesn't get the aircraft. You keep it, along with the patents.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
because aircraft can change their point to point routes only limited by rules put on their flight. To replicate that with trains would be pretty much outside the realm of feasibility.
Lets propose we could actually build such a network, it would most likely be a hub and spoke arrangement. This means that what is a direct route for a plane would be a minimum of two stops for a train. The reason flight is so popular is because of its preservation of time which to many is the most important resource they have.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
If this is achieved for a personal aircraft, I'd be very much on board with this. My only beef is the addition of things like parachutes and air bags. I don't really care too much for those features, as I might be able to get TKS de-icing systems installed for similar weight for those IFR flights in the great white north. Or if I don't have a TKS system, maybe a little extra payload capacity so I can actually fit 4 passengers and fuel without going over gross weight.
Is the competition primarily for the US (civilian), Liberia and Myanmar?
What is this gallon/mpg cruft??
I need 13 grand, a Citroen visa engine, some twelve planks of 1/8 inch birch plywood, 6 feet of 4140 steel tube 1/2 inch diameter, a tig welder, six yards of fiberglass and two quarts of Huntsman Vantico 52 a/b epoxy resin, 1 quart of PR1410 a 1/2, sixty AN3 bolts with nylock nuts, and we are in business
Moving four passengers the 200 miles at 100 MPH on four gallons of gas would pull it off. That would be a 'raw' MPG of 50 MPG. Or, in airplane parliance, that two hour trip would consume at an average rate of 2 gph (Gallons per Hour, the normal measurement used in the aviation industry.) A two-place airplane would need to consume half as much fuel to qualify.
A Cessna 172, with four passengers, consumes somewhere between 7-10 gallons per hour. So this would be a serious improvement. There are some 'light sport' aircraft that draw near 4 GPH, but those are two-place.
Either way, still way better than requiring a raw 200 miles per gallon.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
NASA is being run by bozos for about 40 years now. The scientists and engineers are great, but the administrators who make these decisions are complete morons.
This should be a piece of cake for Burt Rutan of Scaled Composites!
It was a sailplane. Behind the pilot it had a pusher propeller on a pod with folding props. You could sail all day, just starting the engine when the updrafts were bad and you needed to gain altitude again.
I think the article was titled something like "Fly all day on a gallon of gas."
to...
Seriously, use it to stimulate PRIVATE innovation and investment, instead of trying to manually command-and-control the economy. The government can't do, or direct people to do, things with half the efficiency that entrepreneurs can.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
Innovation to be motivated by personal gain, news at 11!
Shut down NASA, now. What a total waste of taxpayer dollars.
I've heard it stated that the fat of a 300 pound person is equivalent to 10 gallons of gasoline (petrol). Liposuction, biofuel, weight loss.
Keep Doing Good.
A glider (called a sailplanein the US) gets a lot of miles for the few gallons used by the tow plane to get it airborne , provided there are the right wind/thermal/mountain conditions. I remember a few decades ago there was a gliding competition in The South Island, and one of the entrants was a former NASA employee. Forty years ago last week he came within 30 seconds of trying to glide where there is no atmosphere...
What I remember from my days in aerospace engineering classes at Univ. of MO - Rolla ("Where the men are men, the women are scarce and the sheep are nervous."), the factors involved are: lift vs gravity, thrust vs drag.
Ultra-light weight
Plug-in Serial electric hybrid
Choose engine optimized for efficiency/weight
Perhaps jet turbine?
Choose light-weight batteries
Solar panels on wings (lightweight ones!)
Super-low coefficient of drag
Advanced wing design
Advanced propeller design
No A/C or pressurization or retractable gear will also drop a lot of weight, but you'll have to be careful in designing your wheel fairings to reduce drag as much as possible. That's a first-year class to play with the wind tunnel, though. Fun times. No pressurization will limit your ceiling, but oh well, we're going for efficiency here! No retractable gear will lower your max speed, but again, we gotta drop the weight for the sake of efficiency. (I'd like to see some #'s about the efficiency tradeoffs of going with lower coefficient of drag with retractable gear vs less weight due to fixed gear. My gut tells me the weight is more important, but my gut could easily be wrong.)
This would be a very fun project. I wonder if Rutan is going to participate.
This aircraft will have to be a flying wing.
If eestor is for real, then make the aircraft electric, and use power from the ground.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
L/D for a really good plane 50:1
plane weighs roughly 4 times as much as the passengers (proabbly lowball)
passenger weighs 80 kg
speed=100 miph=160 kph=50 m/s
so constant power required=1/50*(4*80)*10*50=3200W
Best engine efficiency ~40%, best prop ~80%, calorific content of fuel is 38 MJ/kg= .8*4*38 MJ/gallon, so fuel consumption is 3200/(.32*3.2*38*10^6) gallons per second. So in 2 hours there are 7200 seconds, so ttoal fuel used is 3200/(.32*3.2*38*10^6)*7200
So, that is 0.6 gallons for 200 miles for one passenger
Conclusion, probably do-able, it'll cost way more than 1.5 million
For what voyage does it make sense to take a plane which only goes 100mph? There's remote locations where you can take a plane point-to-point but not a land vehicle, but not really all that many.
Trebuchet.
Seriously though, who wants to fly 100 mph, except for short hops?
They should have a different contest, for a 10% increase over the state-of-the-art (whatever it is) for various classes of commercial craft. Of course, since companies like Boeing and Airbus are probably doing everything they can to get better fuel economy without compromising safety, and since a lot more than $1.5 million is being spent by those companies, I don't see a whole lot of benefit in such a contest.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Put big wheels on the back and a small wheels on the front so it's always rolling downhill. Great for fuel economy!
Damn! The headline didn't say anything about the aircraft having to actually fly. Otherwise, I have a killer prototype. No, really. It's already killed several passengers. Hmmm... Maybe that could be deducted from the "passenger miles per gallon" requirement? Yeah, that's the ticket. I might yet be in the running!
In the meantime, let me tell you about my other world-beating invention: pastry with NO calories. Until you eat it.
Oh, man, am I glad it's Friday.
One "Aw, Shit!" is worth 100 "Ata boys!"
LOL! Yeah, it's like offering a million dollars in reward for someone who can figure out how to break all existing encryption, when you would suddenly be able to help yourself to a lot more than a million dollars. Who would ever do something so stupid?
Oh, wait...
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
This; http://machinedesign.com/article/throw-out-the-textbooks-diesel-airplanes-are-here-0619 is a production airplane already getting 133 passenger miles per gallon per the contest conditions. its a 4 seater in current configuration but has a 950 lb load rating with full fuel. so if we assume 170 lbs per passenger 6 passengers would put you 70 lbs over max. lose 10 gallons of fuel and your back to overall weight. this would give you 200 passenger MPG of course two would have to ride in the luggage bay but you would still be within the planes limits. feel free to correct me if my math is off but if not and you decide to go do it and win, well 10 grand as a finders fee would be nice!!!
does anybody know how much this one consumes?
speed: 170 km/h (~100 mph)
range: 700 km
http://www.dlr.de/en/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-10/60_read-18278/
True. But typically, these prizes don't preclude somebody from keeping 100% of the money they might get from later producing it, in addition to the prize money. Think SpaceShipOne and the X prize.
In other words, if you win, at the very least, you're guaranteed to get $1.5 million, without worrying about whether or not you're able to get your production business of the ground, selling a patent, how good the economy is, etc.
This is especially good for inventors who think that a business risk is too much, but feel confident enough to build the product (to win the prize).
That's 200 PASSENGER miles per gallon. If you fill up my Acura TSX, it almost gets that too. It's a fair rating, I'm just saying don't compare it to a Prius.
Currently hooked on AMP
This can be just about be done with off the shelf equip. Key thing is frontal area of the cockpit, needs to be as small and streamlined as possible.
A gallon of diesel is about 3.8*0.8*42000000 =130MJ and can be converted into propulsive power at 30-35% total efficiency so your energy budget is about 40MJ, or 6kW per person.
High performance gliders have >40:1 L/D at about 50knots. So you have to raise your glider about 8km to do 320km, requiring about 80kJ per kg. Therefore you have a mass budget of about 500kg per person - far more than needed.
Extend a standard 15m glider cockpit to seat 4 people in a line with a VW 1.2l TDi engine (~20-25kW at best efficiency) at rear and pusher prop out end of tail boom. Fit 15m class wings (built for many g of loading anyway, and have top speeds of anywhere up to 200knots). Fly the route and collect the money.
Seriously, use it to stimulate PRIVATE innovation and investment, instead of trying to manually command-and-control the economy. The government can't do, or direct people to do, things with half the efficiency that entrepreneurs can.
Ideally, yes. Unfortunately, the problem from a political standpoint is that because the money goes to whoever does the best job instead of whoever lives in a particular congressional district, this is a really difficult thing to do -- that's why this prize is only $1.5 million, which is basically a rounding error when it comes to federal budgets. For example, recently NASA wanted to use $150 million of its stimulus funding to stimulate commercial spaceflight. Senator Richard Shelby (R-Al) put up a fuss and blocked NASA's overall stimulus funding until they diverted that money to the (diseased and broken) Ares I rocket program based in his state.
http://www.spacepolitics.com/2009/07/03/shelby-wins-battle-on-stimulus-funding/
http://commercialspacegateway.com/item/21342-a-brief-history-review-for-sen
http://www.nasawatch.com/archives/2009/07/sen_shelby_gets.html
I mean, the aircraft itself might be worth more than that off a production line once it's been invented.
I don't get this. There's not that much demand for small fuel efficient aircraft.