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Solar-Powered Plane Makes Runway Debut
MikeChino writes "The much-hyped Solar Impulse airplane just completed its first runway test, paving the way for a 20-to-25-day trip around the world next year. Conceived by Bertrand Piccard, the single-pilot plane successfully used its four solar powered motors to taxi around the runway. If all goes according to plan the plane will be able to fly day and night without fuel, signaling a bright future for solar-powered flight."
Well, a plane is just a flying car after all...
Kinda interesting they didn't have the dimensions of the solar plane readily available. From the pictures it looks like the wingspan is an easy 100 feet to carry how much, one guy? Wonder how big the wings would be to carry 200 passengers, oh, and where would get the energy to carry them at 600mph? Seems to me solar and flight are fundamentally at odds simply because you need vast surface area to get the energy to reach high speeds...but then, maybe it can work, almost like you optimize
solar powered plane energy = kw * wing area meters ^ 2 - kw * motor * mass * velocity ^ 2.
and
mass = wing density * wing area meters ^ 2
would have to factor in wind resistance from the giant wings, but that's cross sectional area, I thought, that causes drag, so if you made the wings really thin...
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Da*nit, I want to get on a Zeppelin in say Toronto and spend 2-3 days cruising leisurely (which a nice train style sleeper-cabin, restaurant and bar, free wi-fi of course) to Europe, ideally with service running on an a day that is modified in length in order to reduce jet lag once I get there. If travel were civilized spending more time doing it would be ok. Case in point: Life lessons from an ad man.
So can we get our flying cars already?
Never say never. Ah!! I did it again!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oNHD41MLMk
But a manned plane would be pretty neat. Hope it has enough batteries for the night - the solar UAV does a lot of gliding, which might not be possible with a heavier aircraft actually attempting to get somewhere.
RTFS!
"If all goes according to plan the plane will be able to fly day and night without fuel, signaling a bright future for solar-powered flight."
We both said a lot of things that you are going to regret.
Interesting that on their web site the wingspan is 63,40 m but mass is 1 600 Kg. I suppose they can afford less confusion with the mass of their aircraft.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
we definitely need more and more of that kind of solutions, not sure though if such solar planes will make it info mainstream
Combine this with the predator and we are soo.... soo.. **
It crashed in 2003 in the Pacific Ocean :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pages_from_64317main_helios-3.jpg
Unexplainably, it stopped the project. I still wonder why.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
.. and my brain made these funny images of a runaway plane not quite ready for commitment..
...always on the forefront of exploration!!! ;-)
This guy isn't insightful, he is a twit.
Not all planes are passenger planes. This plane would be perfect for unmanned or long range observation. Carrying all your fuel aboard becomes incredibly expensive the longer your range has to be. This plane solves that by refueling constantly while inflight.
Insightful? No, short-sighted, yes.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Oh yeah, all day and all of the night.
Squirrel!
This one http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Challenger plus he was involved with the NASA one http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_Prototype. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_B._MacCready Hmm, looks like he died a few years ago. (Note corelation =/= causation. His working on a solar plane probably had nothing to do with his death.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Well, this solar plane isn't so much a plane as it is a motor glider given the wingspan and aspect ratio. The motor is just enough to get it off the ground and help gain altitude when thermals and other updraft conditions are not present. Gliders seem to fly just fine and they have a zero power-to-weight ratio, so that argument is a bit naive. Gliders can also be fairly fast given the right conditions: there are high-performance glider races where the gliders fly around 200 knots over a course of about 180 nautical miles (although I wouldn't say the particular aircraft in this article would be a "high performance" aircraft).
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
Yeah, right, chief, they are idiots and you are real smart. Did you ever hear about a thing called lift to drag ratio? An enormous, extremely high aspect ratio wing has a lift to drag ratio that is out of sight. And power necessary to overcome parasitic drag is proportional to the cube of the speed. This thing flies at a hair over 20 mph near the surface and peaks at about 45 mph at high altitude where the lower air density cuts the drag.
Oh, and if you don't want clouds in the way you, like, fly over them, ya know?
Common ultralights are ridiculously inefficient, aerodynamically, because they don't NEED to be any better to perform their mission.
...that they're taking off on a cloudy day on the video? Maybe that's why it was only a runway test ;^)
"Before God we are all equally wise - and equally foolish"
Albert Einstein
But the decimal separator is crucial, so it should be as unambiguous as possible.
But with the rise of the spreadsheet, something else became ambiguous: decimal separator vs. the field separator in CSV files. (I prefer tabs, but some of our service providers prefer commas; it's a good thing I live in Anglophonia.)
---
Hydrogen Power Feed @ Feed Distiller
You left out one important part of your 200 passenger plane. Strength of materials to enable any reasonable speeds. I would be curious just how calm of air this solar plane needs to get airborne and stay there without being being damaged. Then there is the whole issue of flying for that many days and not encountering turbulent weather.
Planes already use exotic materials to weigh as little as financially reasons allow. While this solar plane is a neat concept its nothing more than that. I was more interested in human powered flight across the channel.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
The tech been in development for a while now...
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No Red Eyes.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
Presumably, however, it is flying on stored power during the night and charging during the day. If the sun is not present during the day then you won't be able to charge and you'll have to glide. Not a problem if you're flying over land - you just need to find a runway in the next few hours - but a big problem if you're in the middle of the ocean. That said, I'd love to have a solar powered light aircraft with a slightly bigger capacity and a shorter range. I wouldn't want to fly for more than a few hours at a time, but having something I could just park outside on an airfield and come back the next day to find it ready to fly would be great.
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all the people that have done it in past must be cheating.
<a href="http://www.coolforsale.com/" title="coolforsale.com" rel="nofollow">
Unlikely to be any search association either way, fortunately or unfortunately depending on your point of view. It's very unlikely that that spammer will ever get enough karma to avoid having rel=nofollow applied to all its links...
(1)DOCOMEFROM!2~.2'~#1WHILE:1<-"'?.1$.2'~'"':1/.1$.2'~#0"$#65535'"$"'"'&.1$.2'~'#0$#65535'"$#0'~#32767$#1"
With a really good glide ratio, some of the "stored power" could be altitude. Maybe not all of it, but if you can accept a drop of 10,000 feet over the course of the night and plan on climbing back up during the day, you could reduce your need for stored power (and therefore batteries / weight) considerably. Just have enough power on tap to reduce the descent rate, not enough to actually fly level or climb during the night. And, of course, your minimum altitude should still be above the cloud deck so you have sun in the morning to do the climbing, or it has to be able to land for a quick recharge if it gets caught in the clouds.
Something like this could be useful for traffic reporting, weather observation, aerial photography, surveillance, and even communications, provided whatever onboard gear is needed is light enough and low-powered enough. It'd be a damned sight cheaper and more easily replaced than satellites, and with a considerably lower delay. "Flying Internet Access Points", anyone? (note, Internet access speeds much lower after sunset)
I'm not convinced something like this would be terribly useful for manned flight. If you want to fly, you'll get far better lift/mass ratios out of a fuel or battery than you will a solar panel. Dragging the solar panels along on the airframe will add far more weight than the amount of electricity generated in-flight could compensate for. You rapidly run into a zero-sum game of adding more panels to get more power which means more weight and surface area so you need more engine which means you need more power. Something the size of a 747 made out of thin aluminum might get 20 passengers in the air until the first breeze tears the whole thing to shreds.
However, you could use an efficient battery or Hydrogen fuel cell or something, coupled with ground-based solar collectors for charging/fueling, to make it feasible for manned round-trip flights. Flightseeing would be a great application, or recreational aviation. It could also be scaled up for larger aviation, but basically as an alternative fuel to Jet-A with an engine designed to run it.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
Great, it's a plane that can fly using solar power. Due to it's current design, in itself is it very useful? Maybe recreationally. Commercially? Naw. However it does open the path for better solar technolgies, including for cars, homes and other devices. If all goes well it proves that solar technology can be a very viable and renewable resource that's worth investing in, even if it never makes it to huge commercial planes (That might not always be the main method of travel at large distances down the road anyway, seen the rate technology increases.) Power is already fairly cheap, in north america anyway; but soon we could have such an abundance that we no longer pay for electricity (Monthly anyway). As solar panels becomes cheaper and more widely used as they become more effective, we could see alot more people off grid, until it becomes a design standard for houses not to require grid power except during excessive lack of sunlight, or even just to reduce the power load on our not so renewable sources of power. These people right here are at the heart of this advancement. I hope the best for this as twenty years ago even the idea would be completly scoffed at. You want me to invest in a plane that can fly just off of light from our sun....
L/D has nothing to do with it.
Do the math-- 3500 pounds and 12 horsepower -- what's going to be the absolute best rate of climb possible with no friction---? under 100 FPM.
Add a little unavoidable drag and you have a really miserable flying machine.
Also if it takes off at 20MPH, then that implies it can't take off if the wind is more than 6MPH or so in any direction.
A miserable and very dangerous flying machine.
Perhaps you should consider the difference between a plane that can briefly just barely get off the ground, under optimal sun and wind conditions, carrying no usable payload, versus a plane that can takeoff safely in average or marginal weather, and stay up and get somewhere say against a mild wind, and climb at more than 100FPM, and not stall with a mild tail or crosswind, or breakup in turbulence, and carry a useful payload, perhaps even be human-rated, and do so economically, year after year.
Because, as we all know, flight has nothing to do with lift and drag, amirite?
What I really don't get is why you continue to try to apply the dynamics of a plane to something that is obviously not one. This is essentially a solar powered glider. 'Nuff said.
Odi profanum vulgus et arceo
Here is my design: http://www.anticharisma.com/zeplinaeroplane.html It is a better idea than anything I've seen the big boys come up with. If only they'd listen to me huh?
http://www.anticharisma.com/
Impulse power? Piccard? Surely I'm dreaming: next they'll be using subspace arrays to communicate with the thing!!! I'd had a rather strong Gin & Tonic or 2, but I had the impression "Galaxy Quest" was just a comedy... don't tell me G&T disguised the fact that is was a genuine "historical document" after all?
Oh well, look on the bright side! If my great-great-great-great grandchildren serve in Starfleet, at least one of them will have a high probability of seeing Kirk getting his shirt torn off. Be still my beating heart!
And the military applications are equally great. Want to attack a country ? How about a permanent rocket launch basis in the sky that does not ever need to come down ?
Have you noticed that powerful lasers are becoming cheaper and easier all the time, that radars are getting better and better all the time? We're getting to a point where anyone with a few grand will be able to shoot down one of these robot chumpies, and why the hell not, they are robots, and noone gave anyone permission for them to spy on me.
That's my answer to spy planes hovering over us.
KILL EVERY ONE OF THEM.
If you want to make them be both really big and really slow and have them go in long slow and predictable circles, hey so much the better.
This is my sig.
I'm not sure about that, multiplying decimals seems the most obvious problem to me although that may also be a factor (cha-ching!). "6,02.10^23" is perfectly unambiguous while "6.02-" well, you get the point (Har har). There's some crazy folks who do "6.02×10^23" or "6.02*10^23". Those look sort of lame to me among properly formatted calculations, though. That said I wouldn't mind if everyone switched to the asterisk as the primary multiplication symbol, because hey, why not?