Slashdot Mirror
EasyJet May Trial Hydrogen Fuel Cells For Taxiing (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Low-cost airline easyJet is discussing plans to install hydrogen batteries as part of a proposed zero emission fuel system, which would power its aircraft during taxiing. The budget service revealed designs for a hybrid plane this week, and said that it would begin trialling the technology later this year. The system will involve embedding a hydrogen fuel cell on board the aeroplanes, with the energy captured from the brakes on landing able to power the jet on the ground. As the only waste product from a hydrogen cell would be fresh, clean water, Ian Davies, head of engineering at easyJet, also suggested that this could be used to refill the planes' water systems during the flight, providing a water source for passengers to drink and for flushing toilets.
This sounds suspiciously like a perpetual motion machine.
I understand there is a lot of energy which must be dissipated during braking, but enough to make water in flight?
Five comments in, and the signal-to-LUDD ratio from the Luddites has already dragged the conversation so far below the noise floor that it's not even a conversation anymore, just LUDD LUDD LUDD.
Guess what? Internal combustion engines of any kind will, at some point in the future, become non-viable. We'll have to come up with alternatives or lose much of our transporation capabilities. What they're doing here doesn't have anything to do with propulsion during flight, but at least someone is trying to think outside the proverbial box.
What he said. This is buzzword-salad hype from EasyJet to get some free advertising from the media. Nothing more, nothing less.
Not mentioned in the blurb is that this also includes putting motors in the plane's wheels and adding controller hardware. That's going to add on weight to the plane, as I can imagine a set of electric motors (and associated gear trains, etc) that can move a plane that weighs something like 100,000-150,000 lbs are exactly "light". Plus there is the difficulty of packing it all into the landing gear, where there's not exactly a lot of room. You could do a hydraulic drive of some sort, but then you have the pump and motor sitting somewhere, too, plus the weight of the hydraulic fluid.
Less sexy would be to develop a tug that could not only push the plane back, but also perform taxi duties. You could have that thing run on batteries, fuel cells, etc -- and you don't have to fly it everywhere with you.
You would need so little salt to treat the water that the tank would be insignificant in mass compared to the fuel cell equipment, or even the other food service equipment on board.
This idea has many, many problems with it - but "pure H2O" is not one of them.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.