Tesla Roadster, kind of batteries for Jet Aircraft?
I just saw some awesome looking videos of the Tesla Roadster :
Supposedly it runs 250 miles on lithium ion batteries, that it takes just 3.5 hours to recharge it. And that it has a faster acceleration than any Ferrari or other fast car using gas.
And so I am wondering if this usage of lots and lots of small Lithium Ion batteries could work in an airplane?
Supposedly the Tesla Roadster is safe since if one lithium ion cell explodes that it doesn't affect the batteries around it, thus there is no explosion possible with this system. Would there be some way one could just get a jet airplane sufficient amount of those lithium ion batteries in there and get the sufficient thrust to the engine to lift an A380 or any type of short or long range airplane?
I don't really think it is constructive to question Global Warming. It's a fact. And saying that the air industry only is responsible for 2% of the CO2 emissions is not a solution to anything.
The fact is each passenger on an airplane pollutes much more than if that person had stayed at home with the heating on and driving a car around to work and the groceries. That only a small percentage of the population of the developped countries yet fly on airplanes and with the development of developping countries and advancement of everyone's living standards then many more people will want to travel on airplanes.
If Ryanair is investing some hundreds of millions in buying new airplanes, and that other low cost european airlines are doing the same type of investments. Why aren't they doing everything they can to have those future airplanes be flying on renewable 0% CO2 emitting energy. There is hydrogen, batteries, biofuels, where is the R&D? Where are the prototypes flying? Where are the BBC documentaries about investments that airlines are doing in clean airplane technologies? Where are the facts about possibillity for clean airplanes? When do politicians force airlines (as well as car manufacturers, housing, agriculture, manufacture..) to move towards clean fuel technologies?
I want to see the concept planes, the prototypes, the proof of R&D activities, the tax incentives on companies having clean energy investments, the BBC documentaries about positive developments by the industry to solve the energy and climate crisis.
Hello Charbax, Nice car, but to be a proper Tesla machine shouldn't it be powered by radio waves Sorry to be a wet blanket but before you get too carried away with what is laudable enthusiasm for the crusade against global warming I suggest you do a little bit more research. 1) Electric cars do reduce the pollution at the point of use but where does the power come from to charge the batteries? 2) See if you can find a total energy and resource audit for the construction of said vehicle. 3) Have a look at the problems linked to disposal of exotic battery systems. It's not as simple as it appears on the surface.
And no the power to weight ratio rules out using these batteries in aircraft.
Sadly, most so-called "green" solutions to things don't stack up when you look at the whole product lifecycle. Just think of the problems recycling all those batteries !
Anyway, as Windy says, they are too heavy to use in aircraft. It is very hard to beat the energy density of hydrocarbon fuel. Think about it - there is a reason why plants store their energy in that form.
By all means look into alternative fuels for vehicles where the energy-per-kilogram ratio is not such an issue but by the same token, aviation is the last place we should be criticising for use of hydrocarbon fuel because there are far fewer workable alternatives.
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The fact is each passenger on an airplane pollutes much more than if that person had stayed at home with the heating on . . .
Sorry, but suggesting that people should simply stay at home instead of flying is just silly.
I seldom buy into arguments of this type but occasionally the direction the argument is going drags me in.
I was once ridiculed for objecting to a proposed rail link on the grounds of its negative impact. The problem was the greenies were pushing for it because they figured it was environmentally better than the existing bus service to the area.
My point was that the cost of manufacturing the components for a rail system (in environmental terms) was higher, the energy required to transport the passengers was the same if not higher because of the mass of the train as against a bus and the losses in the system were greater.
The latter went right over the head of the person I was dealing with as I tried to explain that in each conversion of energy there were losses, so when you convert the chemical energy of coal to heat you incur a loss then you convert it to kinetic energy, then electricity at each step a loss. You then have transmission losses in geting it to the train and then once again the loss in converting it to kinetic energy ie. motion. Whats more you concentrate the pollution in one area rather than spreading it out as a bus does!
The question is which is worse for the environment, A train service which if undersubscribed is a white elephant, concentrating pollution in one area. Or a Bus service which if unneeded can be switched to other routes and spreads it's pollution over a wide area giving the environment greater chance of dealing with it.
Which is precisely why we need young people to take an interest in science at school.
If there is such a big problem with the environment then we shall need clear scientific thinking to deal with it, and above all people will need to be able to understand arguments involving energy, chemistry, nuclear structure in order to make effective and informed choices.
Soundbites and bandwagons do far more harm than good. As R4 rightly points out, many of the proposed "solutions" are either ineffective, or will actually make the situation worse !
New fuels, new technologies don't just grow on trees. Meanwhile, physics at 'A' level is down 50% in the last ten years, so who exactly in the next generation is going to sort all this out ?
i"m still wondering why everyone thinks nuclear power is the answer to carbon dioxide emissions? the simple fact is with nuclear power (ignoring for one minute the radioactivity arguments) we are adding to the net input of energy to the earth!
It has just been realised that the burning of fossil fuels is releasing Carbon (in the form of CO2) into the eco system! DUH!!!
To solve that we are proposing releasing the energy locked up in Uranium as a cure?????
At the end of the day we have a problem with releasing a simple energy sequestration system and our answer is to try releasing a much more potent and problematical source!
We didn't properly investigate the ramifications of our actions in the simple system so let's just jump into the more dangerous system without any real appreciation of what effect it might have!
Just a quick side point. I once had an engineer explain to me the fact that it costs more in energy terms to produce a wind farm than it can ever produce. But they are built to appease the masses!
Can't disagree with any of that. All we hear about are things like windfarms to produce more energy, but we hear much less noise about solutions like switching off unnecessary exterior lighting that actually reduce the amount of energy consumed.
The reason is simple - you can't tax people for not using energy. So, instead of solutions that save wasted energy and save everyone money into the process, they just slap taxes on flying. Brilliant.
Now, as Charbax pointed out, the demand for energy is on the increase. Well, if we allow the World's population to grow from 6 billion to 8 billion over the next 20 years that's another 33% increase we have to deal with. Overpopulation is a major cause of all these troubles and must be dealt with, but for reasons that I fail to understand this is never discussed. Why ?
To haul ourselves back to the original question of using batteries on aircraft, I see that the Tesla Roadster's batteries have a mass of 450kg. That's right, nearly half a ton of batteries to haul around !! No wonder it's only a two-seater, with no luggage space ! Still, 250 miles on one charge is quite impressive, so let's see how it works out.
Aviation fuel and petrol have an energy density (strictly speaking, specific energy) of about 43MJ per kilogram. Those 450kg of batteries store 56kWh of electrical energy, which as you can figure out for yourself is about ten times worse.
To illustrate this point, I note that my Impreza will easily do 250 miles on 45 litres of petrol, with a mass less than one-tenth of the Roadster's batteries. Of course, my fuel tank gets lighter as I use up the fuel whereas the electric car has to haul around the full 450kg all the time, so the true efficiency factor is more like 20:1.
If you scale this up to an aircraft (turbine engines are generally much more efficient than a family car), you can see that the batteries would be at least twenty times too heavy !
Last edited by Grainger : 30th January 2007 at 16:28.
Overpopulation is a major cause of all these troubles and must be dealt with
An often overlooked but very important point. The fact that we are not able to deal with cutting back energy consumption and have the added prediction of lots of people in China soon to be putting out as much as we do makes me grow weary. I'm not sure you can convince such a huge number of people.
The thing that worries me most is that even if 6 billion people all sat in the cold and dark for a day, we'd still all be breathing and therefore emitting CO2, as well as body heat, so still adding to the problem.
People always trot out those charts of time vs. global temperature, but i'd be much more interested to see the effect of population of global temperature over time. Trouble is, you can't very easily cut back on people.
Trouble is, you can't very easily cut back on people.
It isn't people as such that we need to cut back on, just the birth rate. Every second of every day, three people die but more than four are born. If we'd done something about it in the 1970s we could be sitting on a sustainable population of 2 to 3 billion right now, with only half the CO2 output.
Interestingly enough, about the only country that has been doing something about it is the much-maligned China.
A good start would be if our religious leaders stopped telling people not to use condoms. Cut down on AIDS too.
Again I remind all you folk that doubt the electric solution...it is the saving while stationary which will make a huge and imediate difference.
Sitting in line at most American schools is the norm. Engine on for heating, or cooling...hell, sometime both, but rarely engine off. Thousands and thousands and thousands of them...and that's just the Mums going for their kids.
Think of London, with all the traffic that is standing still, being totally silent and not a spec of pollution being emitted. Furthermore, when they finally pull away, there won't be the usual cloud of collected cr@p puffed out of the tail.
The Tesla is quite fantasic, one wants one more than nookie. Mind you, Jay Leno's new jet car is kinda sexy. If I had one of those, I would probably poo-poo the greenies...I'd even poo-poo their poo poos. (Appologies to Stephen Fry.)
I wasn't trying to malign China at all you must understand. I am aware that they have a one child policy which I think is a good idea (I think some people in this country are worthy of a no child policy), but I got shouted down last time I mentioned that in a GW thread because of freedom of choice and so on.
Am I correct in thinking that a sizeable proportion of their population is going to be ramping up it's consumption in the near future, or have I fallen into the "i've been trusting the media too much" beartrap? If it is true, it's going to look a bit rich if we say " you can't do that, because we already have and we went a bit overboard".
Ginger
Last edited by Gingerbread Man : 30th January 2007 at 23:23.
Reason: Because I can't tpye
If stationary traffic is the problem, then help it run freely by clearing our roads of all the traffic lights, chicanes, and bottlenecks that have been introduced to clog everything up and justify all the congestion taxes.
And have a look at the car: there's half a ton of batteries - no room for the kids ! Tell you what - I wouldn't want to be in a shunt with 450kg of batteries just behind my seat .
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The Tesla is quite fantasic, one wants one more than nookie.
I see you've been seduced by the slick graphics and fancy website.
But as Windy said at the start, think about where the electricity comes from in the first place. When you take into account generation and transfer losses, the Tesla has a CO2 emission equivalent of 89 - 178 g/km.
Just the same as a normal petrol car.
['s alright, G_M, I wasn't meaning that you were maligning China. At least you (and Windy and R4) are making some kind of sense.]
What we need is a propulsion system that uses AIR as its source of energy. Of course it may require an initial energy source to initiate the reaction (perhaps a fan to draw-in the air and a device to create a spark), but these are mere details to be ironed-out when the invention has been created.
The Tesla roadster looks nice. (Only $92,000 for a souped up Sinclair C5).
But- how do I get from one end of the country to the other without a 3.5 hr recharging break? Anyone know where I can buy a nice portable petrol generator to recharge it out on the road away from a filling station?
Don't forget Destination Moon, They used water. and that was in the fifties I would love to see that film again, very good for its time.
Heating will be a problem, it can't come out of the batteries that's for sure. All retardation will have to go in to recharging and w.n. heating. I suppose a small fuel heater will become a must, but it will no doubt be part of a top up charging system.
The biggie will be each wheel being a motor. Computer controlled input will give very good traction control and electric braking. I fear that there will also always have to be some other brakes however.
Grainger you make excellent points, I don't particularly disagree but hope to amplify usefully on a couple of them, according to my lights:
Grainger: ....To haul ourselves back to the original question of using batteries on aircraft, I see that the Tesla Roadster's batteries have a mass of 450kg. That's right, nearly half a ton of batteries to haul around !! No wonder it's only a two-seater, with no luggage space ! Still, 250 miles on one charge is quite impressive, so let's see how it works out.
What do you think the engine, transmission, fuel, & tank, which the Tesla lacks, weigh on a conventional car? It ain't far off.
(Edited to note that reading more completely I find that the Tesla does have a two-speed transmission.)
G: Aviation fuel and petrol have an energy density (strictly speaking, specific energy) of about 43MJ per kilogram. Those 450kg of batteries store 56kWh of electrical energy, which as you can figure out for yourself is about ten times worse.
The energy stored in a pound of fuel is way way more than the energy in a pound of battery, you are right. However, I expect that the electrical-to-mechanical conversion efficiency in the Tesla is in the 90% neighborhood (didn't see any numbers on the Wikipedia site linked in another post, but certain specialized electric motors in some applications are 98-99% efficient).
(Further edited to note that Wikipedia gives motor efficiency as 80% full load and 90% average.)
By contrast, basic thermal efficiency of a gasoline engine is in the 25%-30% range, meaning 70%-75% of the energy in the gasoline is wasted as heat--and that's BEFORE drive train losses in the transmission and drive train. So there is much better recovery of the stored battery energy than the stored gasoline energy in propelling the vehicle.
G: To illustrate this point, I note that my Impreza will easily do 250 miles on 45 litres of petrol, with a mass less than one-tenth of the Roadster's batteries. Of course, my fuel tank gets lighter as I use up the fuel whereas the electric car has to haul around the full 450kg all the time, so the true efficiency factor is more like 20:1.
I think this is an unfair conclusion for the above reasons.
G: If you scale this up to an aircraft (turbine engines are generally much more efficient than a family car), you can see that the batteries would be at least twenty times too heavy !
I agree that battery-powered aircraft are not on the horizon, but battery-powered cars are here and will evolve to become much more practical.
Last edited by kansasw : 31st January 2007 at 00:05.
Again I remind all you folk that doubt the electric solution...it is the saving while stationary which will make a huge and imediate difference.
Sitting in line at most American schools is the norm. Engine on for heating, or cooling...hell, sometime both, but rarely engine off. Thousands and thousands and thousands of them...and that's just the Mums going for their kids.
Think of London, with all the traffic that is standing still, being totally silent and not a spec of pollution being emitted. Furthermore, when they finally pull away, there won't be the usual cloud of collected cr@p puffed out of the tail.
Don't hybrid cars such as the Prius resolve this problem? Granted there remains the issue of the source of the electricity but it must be a step in the right direction right?
Going off the point slightly maybe, I was reading a car magazine recently and on the questions page there was a letter regarding alternative fuels, including a refrence to the tesla in fact, asking about whish is the best, put simply. The reply stated that these are of a higher octane than regular unleaded (95Octane) or super unleaded (98 Octane). I'm not a chemist so I was wondering, how feasable is the development of a biofuel that can be used in aircraft? Also, would it be possible to use hydrogen as an aircraft fuel if it could be safley extracted from a renewable source?
HB
Last edited by Bartender : 31st January 2007 at 00:48.
One of my hare-brain fantasies of long ago was the completely non-electric car. It would probably run on propane and diesel. Compressed air starting. Gas-lamps for headlamps. Little pilot-lights (or flints??) to start the tail-lamps when braking was applied and the main gas supply turned on. etc etc.
But technology has moved in the other direction and my electronics degree with computer experience is a better fit for today's car.
Where did I recently see the listing of life-cycle balance for various energy sources. How many years would it take to pay back the energy required to make a hydro dam, etc.
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I would love to see that film again, very good for its time. 
