Firms Team Up On Hybrid Electric Plane Technology (bbc.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: Airbus, Rolls-Royce and Siemens are to develop hybrid electric engine plane technology as part of a push towards cleaner aviation. The E-Fan X programme will first put an electric engine with three jet engines on a BAe 146 aircraft. The firms want to fly a demonstrator version of the plane by 2020, with a commercial application by 2030. Firms are racing to develop electric engines for planes after pressure from the EU to cut aviation pollution. Each of the partners in the programme will be investing tens of millions of pounds, they said on a press call. The firms are developing hybrid technology because fully electric commercial flights are currently out of reach, a spokeswoman said.

Comments

Re:Diminishing returns

[MightyYar]

so it seems odd they need cooling equipment.

You still need a way to transfer the heat from where it is generated to the nice, cold heat sink. As a simple thought experiment, a motor operating in a thermos isn't really going to care much about the outside temperature - you need a way to get the heat from the motor to the air outside the thermos. Obviously you won't purposely insulate the aircraft motor, but the principle is the same.

Think about the amount of power dissipated... a 2 MW motor - even if 99% efficient - is going to dissipate 20 kW of heat. Think about the heatsink for your ~100W CPU and scale it up by 200x. Not an impossible task but definitely an engineering challenge.

Re:Physics is a harsh mistress

[WheezyJoe]

So, your point is light and more rigid materials. You haven't answered sjbe's point of slow, bulky, and cannot fly in inclement weather. No matter how light you make your airframe, an airship is always going to be bulky because of how buoyancy works; to float, it must be lighter than an equal volume of the surrounding fluid. But being less weight is awful in view of winds and storms, and being bulky sucks for achieving any appreciable speed.

So, at best, you're offering the public a mode of transport that is slower than airplanes, takes up more room at an airport, and flights must be canceled if wind gusts along the route get too high, winds that a 777 can punch through with barely a bump. And yet still your airship must slurp tons of fuel to fight wind-resistance and air currents. Who's gonna buy a ticket for that? You wanna get somewhere, you're better off walking or taking a bus.

The nail in the coffin is the lighter-than-air substance. Hydrogen? Expensive and burns, see Hindenburg. Helium? Expensive, planet Earth is running out of the stuff, and retrieving what there is often comes as a byproduct of dirty fossil fuel drilling. And they both leak like mad from whatever container you put it in, especially something lightweight for floating, consequence of being such tiny atoms. Worse, you got to bleed even more of it right out into the atmosphere in order to land. Lighter, more rigid materials don't do shit for this. Dirigibles suck. Own it.