It's a shitty article which says "conventional systems like jet engines". Given how poor this kind of reporting typically is... that could mean anything. Are they talking about a turbojet? Turbofan? Turboprop? Who knows.
If they actually meant that it's as efficient as a turbojet, then that's pretty crap really. There's a reason why airliners use turbofans instead.
The official paper is paywalled so I couldn't check any of their numbers.
Hilarious. Meanwhile "organic" produce is much more likely to be contaminated with ecoli exactly because you literally use shit to fertilize it. Those horrible "industrialized" farms use synthetic fertilizers which don't have that problem.
Solar panels certainly aren't going to totally power an aircraft that carries a lot of passengers or freight but if they add to the range it might make sense to include them.
They don't. That's why I said that buddy was clueless (and his followup response confirms it).
Take for example the Airbus A380. It has 4 electrical generators onboard each rated at 150 kVa. There's redundancy in that setup, of course; half of that capacity is just there as a spare, so the max load shouldn't exceed about 90% of half that. And kVa doesn't directly translate to kW, but it's fairly close for estimation purposes. Running some quick numbers it's fair to assume that the peak electrical load on that aircraft is around 200 kW.
That's just the electrical power required by onboard systems. What percentage of that can solar panels possibly generate? Well, running some quick estimates, the total surface area of the top of an airbus A380 is around 1,300 square meters. Assuming 100% efficient solar panels perfectly pointed at the sun, you might get 1,500 kW of energy out of your panels. With a more realistic efficiency of 25% it would be 375. But, of course, only some of those panels will be properly oriented since the fuselage is curved, and the sun will be at an angle. You can probably knock off another 50% right there.
With those numbers we can conclude that covering the entire top of the aircraft with solar panels MIGHT get you enough electricity to just power the existing electrical systems. During the daytime. Meanwhile we haven't even touched the energy that's actually being used to propel the aircraft through the sky.
There's another simpler way to estimate total energy requirements. The max fuel load of the A380 is about 250,000 kg. Aviation fuel typically has an energy density of about 42 MJ/kg. That's roughly 11.6 kWh per kg. Multipled by 250,000 we arrive at 2,900,000 kWh. Given that our hypothetical solar panels output a very optimistic maximum of 375 kW, over a 16 hour flight they would produce about 6,000 kWh.
6,000 divided by 2,900,000 gives us 0.002, meaning that our best-case-scenario solar panels would provide 0.2% of the energy used by the aircraft. That's without considering the impact of the increased weight due to all those panels, and assuming that our flight is done entirely during daytime.
Putting solar panels on a commercial airliner in order to "add range" is like carrying a cup of gasoline in your car for the same purpose. It would be incredibly silly. Anyone who seriously suggests it has obviously never even considered the math.
Correct. Aircraft has a maximum takeoff weight, and a maximum landing weight. These are rarely the same, exactly for the reasons you mentioned. This is also why large planes are equipped with a fuel dump system; if an in-air emergency occurs shortly after takeoff there is a good chance they will have to dump some fuel before they can land safely.
Not necessarily - it could be hydrocarbons powering a highly efficient generator
You mean, like, say... a gas turbine?
So you want to keep the gas turbine which is already there, get rid of the fan or prop, add a massive electrical generator, and use that generator to power this new whatchamacallit?
I'm not sure why you expect to improve efficiency with that setup.
Maybe it can be made better with solar cells all over the top of the fuselage and wings, solar input is predictable for most of the flight duration
This sentence alone makes it obvious that you have no clue what you're talking about. Installing solar cells on a large aircraft for power is like pissing in a pool to try and fill it up.
Only place solar cells make any sense at all for aviation is in unmanned high altitude planes with massive wings, more akin to gliders.
Right, because weighing less on take off (no fuel) is somehow worse..
You always need fuel. In this case your fuel is electricity stored in batteries. Not sure if you're aware, but I hear those tend to weigh a fair bit. You could in theory use fuel cells and compressed or liquid hydrogen instead of, but I'm not sure that would get you much in the way of weight reduction either. So in either scenario you'll have to seriously beef up your landing gear and brakes, which means added weight, which further reduces efficieny and/or max payload.
You want to minimize wear and tear on landing.. Not on takeoff AND landing.
Yes, that's what I said. By dragging batteries around you are not doing that. Your plane weigh just as much on takeoff as on landing.
it's not even just a question of batteries; it's a question of efficiency. From what I can tell this is far less efficient than a propeller. Even if batteries get orders of magnitude better it would make far more sense to just transition to electrically driven propellers and/or fans.
tl;dr there are multiple technologies which need to improve before this could be a viable propulsion method, let alone provide any actual advantage.
In this plane the ions are generated from the air, there is no loss of mass, so nothing "moving" off the plane
That's not actually a good thing. Ideally you want your plane to weigh less on landing than on takeoff. Makes things easier on brakes, tires, suspension, etc.
It's true; if you have no sense of humour and are mildly retarded I can absolutely see why you would think that this particular Jewish homosexual married to a black man was secretly a closeted Nazi who wants to kill all homosexuals, Jews, and blacks.
If, on the other hand, you're a relatively intelligent human being with a healthy sense of humour who grew up hanging out on IRC or 4chan, you would see him for what he actually is: a hilarious troll who holds nothing sacred and will gladly trample over any boundaries just for the lulz. He doesn't have to "say it afterwards"; everything about him makes it obvious. Calling him a Nazi is about as retarded as calling Chris Rock a white supremacist because you heard his "niggas vs black people" routine.
mobile adjective 1. able to move or be moved freely or easily. "he has a weight problem and is not very mobile" 2. relating to mobile phones, handheld computers, and similar technology. "the next generation of mobile networks"
noun 1. a decorative structure that is suspended so as to turn freely in the air. "brightly coloured mobiles rotated from the ceiling" 2. BRITISH. a mobile phone. "we telephoned from our mobile to theirs"
There was zero interpretation; you literally argued exactly what I said:
"Just refusing to carry some non-black-owned channels is meaningless and doesn't help them" "Just carrying 'black channels' doesn't help them" "witness statements confirming racism, especially independent witnesses or multiple similar accounts, will carry a lot of weight"
If you find your own words ridiculous... well, that makes two of us. Perhaps instead of playing the poor misunderstood victim you could try making a coherent and consistent argument for a change.
Because "they carry other black channels" is the same reasoning as saying that someone can't be racist because "they have a black friend."
Which is actually very good evidence that someone isn't racist, despite the fact that idiots laugh it. These being the same idiots who accuse a guy like Milo Yannopolous of being a Nazi despite the fact that he's a Jewish homosexual married to a black man. If the fact that you willingly chose to spend your free time with black friends (or marry a black boyfriend) isn't evidence that you're not racist towards blacks, then literally nothing else is. At that point you may as well call every single human being racist since there's no way to prove that they're not.
These things are not mutually exclusive as racism isn't black and white.
Har.
Someone who locks their car doors when they see black people isn't as racist as neo-Nazi calling for purging of black people but it's still racist.
It's not racist by the actual definition of the word, nor is it even racist in the colloquial sense... any more than a woman who gets her pepper spray ready when she sees a man approaching on a dark street would be considered sexist. People know there's a statistical disparity, and they make gut judgements about their safety based on all kinds of factors. That same woman probably wouldn't be as worried if the approaching male was a skinny 5 foot tall blatant homosexual, and your hypothetical people locking their doors likely wouldn't do that if the black people they see are clean cut men in business suits. Calling someone racist or sexist simply because they don't want to be victimized is idiotic.
Hilarious. You just argued that carrying other black shows isn't evidence they're not being racist when it comes to this channel, and refusing to carry many white shows isn't evidence they're not racist when it comes to this channel... but that "eyewitness accounts" of random incidents are somehow "heavy evidence" that they are racist when it comes to this channel.
Your standard of evidence seems to be "anything that makes them look guilty is evidence, everything else is not".
Leaving aside the response you already got about the ford fusion... what the heck is wrong with "jump drive"? I honestly can't figure out what your objection is to that one...
I was going to correct you with the meaning of those acronyms we all know...
Well then allow me to correct you; they aren't acronyms. NASA, Scuba, and Laser are acronyms, while DVD, FBI, and KFC are initialisms. If it's pronounced as individual letters rather than as a word, it's not an acronym.
50 out of 10,000 isn't a lot. They could bump that up to 500 and still have plenty to service the more populated latitudes. I can currently get (expensive) satellite internet from Iridium pretty much anywhere on the globe, and they have less than 100 satellites total. Increasing that by two orders of magnitude ought to improve things a wee bit.
I don't know how we will survive without your high definition, high framerate videos of cows grazing... God forbid it take more than 15 minutes for you to upload it!
Based on your gut feeling? To me it sounds like it shouldn't be expensive at all. Now what?
Part of solving this issue is to keep prices down around the range that someone in Toronto would pay.
The only way to do that is by subsidizing it. The actual resource cost of providing a service to a handful of people in the middle of nowhere is always going to be far more expensive per-person than providing the same service to a city of 5 million people. Regardless of whether you're using fiber, microwaves, radio-towers, or satellites, the only way you're going to make prices equal is by charging people in the cities too much in order to offset the artificially low cost in the rural regions.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a shitty article which says "conventional systems like jet engines". Given how poor this kind of reporting typically is ... that could mean anything. Are they talking about a turbojet? Turbofan? Turboprop? Who knows.
If they actually meant that it's as efficient as a turbojet, then that's pretty crap really. There's a reason why airliners use turbofans instead.
The official paper is paywalled so I couldn't check any of their numbers.
Hilarious. Meanwhile "organic" produce is much more likely to be contaminated with ecoli exactly because you literally use shit to fertilize it. Those horrible "industrialized" farms use synthetic fertilizers which don't have that problem.
Solar panels certainly aren't going to totally power an aircraft that carries a lot of passengers or freight but if they add to the range it might make sense to include them.
They don't. That's why I said that buddy was clueless (and his followup response confirms it).
Take for example the Airbus A380. It has 4 electrical generators onboard each rated at 150 kVa. There's redundancy in that setup, of course; half of that capacity is just there as a spare, so the max load shouldn't exceed about 90% of half that. And kVa doesn't directly translate to kW, but it's fairly close for estimation purposes. Running some quick numbers it's fair to assume that the peak electrical load on that aircraft is around 200 kW.
That's just the electrical power required by onboard systems. What percentage of that can solar panels possibly generate? Well, running some quick estimates, the total surface area of the top of an airbus A380 is around 1,300 square meters. Assuming 100% efficient solar panels perfectly pointed at the sun, you might get 1,500 kW of energy out of your panels. With a more realistic efficiency of 25% it would be 375. But, of course, only some of those panels will be properly oriented since the fuselage is curved, and the sun will be at an angle. You can probably knock off another 50% right there.
With those numbers we can conclude that covering the entire top of the aircraft with solar panels MIGHT get you enough electricity to just power the existing electrical systems. During the daytime. Meanwhile we haven't even touched the energy that's actually being used to propel the aircraft through the sky.
There's another simpler way to estimate total energy requirements. The max fuel load of the A380 is about 250,000 kg. Aviation fuel typically has an energy density of about 42 MJ/kg. That's roughly 11.6 kWh per kg. Multipled by 250,000 we arrive at 2,900,000 kWh. Given that our hypothetical solar panels output a very optimistic maximum of 375 kW, over a 16 hour flight they would produce about 6,000 kWh.
6,000 divided by 2,900,000 gives us 0.002, meaning that our best-case-scenario solar panels would provide 0.2% of the energy used by the aircraft. That's without considering the impact of the increased weight due to all those panels, and assuming that our flight is done entirely during daytime.
Putting solar panels on a commercial airliner in order to "add range" is like carrying a cup of gasoline in your car for the same purpose. It would be incredibly silly. Anyone who seriously suggests it has obviously never even considered the math.
Correct. Aircraft has a maximum takeoff weight, and a maximum landing weight. These are rarely the same, exactly for the reasons you mentioned. This is also why large planes are equipped with a fuel dump system; if an in-air emergency occurs shortly after takeoff there is a good chance they will have to dump some fuel before they can land safely.
Not necessarily - it could be hydrocarbons powering a highly efficient generator
You mean, like, say ... a gas turbine?
So you want to keep the gas turbine which is already there, get rid of the fan or prop, add a massive electrical generator, and use that generator to power this new whatchamacallit?
I'm not sure why you expect to improve efficiency with that setup.
Maybe it can be made better with solar cells all over the top of the fuselage and wings, solar input is predictable for most of the flight duration
This sentence alone makes it obvious that you have no clue what you're talking about. Installing solar cells on a large aircraft for power is like pissing in a pool to try and fill it up.
Only place solar cells make any sense at all for aviation is in unmanned high altitude planes with massive wings, more akin to gliders.
Right, because weighing less on take off (no fuel) is somehow worse..
You always need fuel. In this case your fuel is electricity stored in batteries. Not sure if you're aware, but I hear those tend to weigh a fair bit. You could in theory use fuel cells and compressed or liquid hydrogen instead of, but I'm not sure that would get you much in the way of weight reduction either. So in either scenario you'll have to seriously beef up your landing gear and brakes, which means added weight, which further reduces efficieny and/or max payload.
You want to minimize wear and tear on landing.. Not on takeoff AND landing.
Yes, that's what I said. By dragging batteries around you are not doing that. Your plane weigh just as much on takeoff as on landing.
idiot.
You seem terribly confused.
it's not even just a question of batteries; it's a question of efficiency. From what I can tell this is far less efficient than a propeller. Even if batteries get orders of magnitude better it would make far more sense to just transition to electrically driven propellers and/or fans.
tl;dr there are multiple technologies which need to improve before this could be a viable propulsion method, let alone provide any actual advantage.
In this plane the ions are generated from the air, there is no loss of mass, so nothing "moving" off the plane
That's not actually a good thing. Ideally you want your plane to weigh less on landing than on takeoff. Makes things easier on brakes, tires, suspension, etc.
It's true; if you have no sense of humour and are mildly retarded I can absolutely see why you would think that this particular Jewish homosexual married to a black man was secretly a closeted Nazi who wants to kill all homosexuals, Jews, and blacks.
If, on the other hand, you're a relatively intelligent human being with a healthy sense of humour who grew up hanging out on IRC or 4chan, you would see him for what he actually is: a hilarious troll who holds nothing sacred and will gladly trample over any boundaries just for the lulz. He doesn't have to "say it afterwards"; everything about him makes it obvious. Calling him a Nazi is about as retarded as calling Chris Rock a white supremacist because you heard his "niggas vs black people" routine.
Correct. Is he really objecting to the name based on some part of a board game that most people never even heard of?
Wrong.
mobile
adjective
1. able to move or be moved freely or easily.
"he has a weight problem and is not very mobile"
2. relating to mobile phones, handheld computers, and similar technology.
"the next generation of mobile networks"
noun
1. a decorative structure that is suspended so as to turn freely in the air.
"brightly coloured mobiles rotated from the ceiling"
2. BRITISH. a mobile phone.
"we telephoned from our mobile to theirs"
There was zero interpretation; you literally argued exactly what I said:
"Just refusing to carry some non-black-owned channels is meaningless and doesn't help them"
"Just carrying 'black channels' doesn't help them"
"witness statements confirming racism, especially independent witnesses or multiple similar accounts, will carry a lot of weight"
If you find your own words ridiculous ... well, that makes two of us. Perhaps instead of playing the poor misunderstood victim you could try making a coherent and consistent argument for a change.
Yeah, it's always someone else's fault.
Because "they carry other black channels" is the same reasoning as saying that someone can't be racist because "they have a black friend."
Which is actually very good evidence that someone isn't racist, despite the fact that idiots laugh it. These being the same idiots who accuse a guy like Milo Yannopolous of being a Nazi despite the fact that he's a Jewish homosexual married to a black man. If the fact that you willingly chose to spend your free time with black friends (or marry a black boyfriend) isn't evidence that you're not racist towards blacks, then literally nothing else is. At that point you may as well call every single human being racist since there's no way to prove that they're not.
These things are not mutually exclusive as racism isn't black and white.
Har.
Someone who locks their car doors when they see black people isn't as racist as neo-Nazi calling for purging of black people but it's still racist.
It's not racist by the actual definition of the word, nor is it even racist in the colloquial sense ... any more than a woman who gets her pepper spray ready when she sees a man approaching on a dark street would be considered sexist. People know there's a statistical disparity, and they make gut judgements about their safety based on all kinds of factors. That same woman probably wouldn't be as worried if the approaching male was a skinny 5 foot tall blatant homosexual, and your hypothetical people locking their doors likely wouldn't do that if the black people they see are clean cut men in business suits. Calling someone racist or sexist simply because they don't want to be victimized is idiotic.
Hilarious. You just argued that carrying other black shows isn't evidence they're not being racist when it comes to this channel, and refusing to carry many white shows isn't evidence they're not racist when it comes to this channel ... but that "eyewitness accounts" of random incidents are somehow "heavy evidence" that they are racist when it comes to this channel.
Your standard of evidence seems to be "anything that makes them look guilty is evidence, everything else is not".
Leaving aside the response you already got about the ford fusion ... what the heck is wrong with "jump drive"? I honestly can't figure out what your objection is to that one ...
I was going to correct you with the meaning of those acronyms we all know ...
Well then allow me to correct you; they aren't acronyms. NASA, Scuba, and Laser are acronyms, while DVD, FBI, and KFC are initialisms. If it's pronounced as individual letters rather than as a word, it's not an acronym.
50 out of 10,000 isn't a lot. They could bump that up to 500 and still have plenty to service the more populated latitudes. I can currently get (expensive) satellite internet from Iridium pretty much anywhere on the globe, and they have less than 100 satellites total. Increasing that by two orders of magnitude ought to improve things a wee bit.
I also live outside of town, surrounded by farm fields. No need to get your panties in a bunch.
A free market should sort out an existing government subsidy program?
Commies say the darndest things ...
I don't know how we will survive without your high definition, high framerate videos of cows grazing ... God forbid it take more than 15 minutes for you to upload it!
Which means that your "it sounds expensive" comment was entirely pointless.
That sounds like it will be expensive.
Based on your gut feeling? To me it sounds like it shouldn't be expensive at all. Now what?
Part of solving this issue is to keep prices down around the range that someone in Toronto would pay.
The only way to do that is by subsidizing it. The actual resource cost of providing a service to a handful of people in the middle of nowhere is always going to be far more expensive per-person than providing the same service to a city of 5 million people. Regardless of whether you're using fiber, microwaves, radio-towers, or satellites, the only way you're going to make prices equal is by charging people in the cities too much in order to offset the artificially low cost in the rural regions.
Given that they're planning on putting up 10,000+ satellites, it seems likely at least a few will service the northern latitudes.