> This is awesome. Lighter motors also make electric flight more viable
The next innovation we need is Aerial refueling[1] for electric planes. High density swappable batteries and high altitude wind/solar plants that can swap batteries mid air. Perhaps some billionaire will develop a large fleet of these to service all flights! If no western billionaires, we just have to wait for China to develop this tech.
A sufficiently compact electric motor enables mounting it in the nose-wheel of commercial aircraft, allowing it to be driven around like a golf cart. This means the plane can taxi without the use of its engines, just the power from the APU. [1]
Also planes would not have to wait for a tug to pull back from the gate, which improves turnaround times for the airline.
[1] https://www.wheeltug.com/
You could also spin up the landing gear wheels prior to landing to massively reduce the amount of rubber transferred from tire to runway on touchdown. Rarely done today because of the weight and complexity of adding motors, but letting the ground spin up the wheel is pretty expensive both for tire wear and runway maintenance
Apologies for the turbulence, we're just flying through a thunderstorm to top up the batteries
Or laser power beaming from a satellite, or a ground station.
Not very feasible, but an option that has been thought through.
I guess there’s a system that’s gated to track dependent technologies, to track improvements and what they’ll enable.
Surely it would be easier to recharge rather than swap batteries? I wonder if in the future war will be like a turn based strategy game as everyone wait for drones to recharge before making a move.
Mid-air: yes. A boom with a charging cable or even beamed energy would be much easier.
On the ground: swapping batteries is faster, and batteries are cheaper than planes or drones. You want the expensive part back in the air as soon as possible so you don't need as many of them. On the whole this probably also simplifies logistics: in civilian aviation airport space is limited, in wartime it's easier to transport one hundred drones and two hundred battery packs to the frontline than to transport two hundred drones
That's a future thought when it comes to electric aircraft - remote/emergency refuelling. I know they have tested lasers, and even sent a megawatt in 30 seconds over a distance of a few miles, though current convention of the laser back into usable power is around 50% efficiency. All gets down to a needed leap in electricity production and wished the World would get together on fusion reactors and knock it out the park over a mad race to be the first and lock down patents.
A typical regional aircraft needs about 3MW of power to keep in cruise, and has about 50 square metre area, so 60kW per square metre. Even with 50% efficiency you're talking over 100kW/m^2
A laser over 10W has safety implications. This is 50,000 lasers all shining on the same plane.
Given your collectors are only going to be say 50% efficient, you're likely going to dumping enough wasted energy into the wings to melt the aircraft - not sure what dumping 3MW of heat energy into a plane would do over an hour, but I suspect it would stat to melt in a few seconds if you're lucky (otherwise your passengers would start getting very toasty)
At 3MW for an hour that's not a great amount of electricity that's needed - at 10c/kWh it's $300 an hour. You don't need fancy things like fusion to generate that. In the UK alone Solar is currently (in November) generating 600 times that - plus domestic installations.
Probably easier to link up with another aircraft and tow it.
I don't see it working like that in Ukraine...
Difficulty for swapping batteries too - how to differentiate between strategic bombings and a refueling accident.