PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Electric aeroplanes...
View Single Post
Old 16th February 2018 | 21:05
  #33 (permalink)  
Genghis the Engineer
Moderator
30 Countries Visited
25 Anniversary
Veteran: Reserves
 
Joined: Feb 2000
: CPL
Posts: 14,479
Likes: 178
From: UK
I see where you're coming from there Jan, but I think you're missing a fundamental difference in efficiency. An electric powerplant on an aeroplane is around 70-80% efficient, whilst piston engine powerplant is around 15% efficient. So you only need to store for an electric system about 1/5th of the total energy you do in a fuel tank. I'm guessing that there's a similar difference on cars.

The other side of that - and the fundamental problem for electric flight is that the energy storage density of petrol is about 46 MJ/kg, whilst for the very best Li-Ion batteries it's about 0.9 MJ/kg.

So you need 1/5th of the energy (thus allowing sensibleish charging times and very low energy costs) but because energy storage density is about 1/50th - you need 10 times the mass to store energy to do the same amount of work.

On a car, that's bearable within reasonable limits. But the 70L = 50kg of fuel you'd need for an hours flying plus sensible reserves in a PA28 requires around 500kg of batteries. The 450kg difference is all of your available payload, and then some.

G
Genghis the Engineer is offline  
Reply