PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Cruise altitude for electric airplanes.
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Old 21st Dec 2018, 17:17
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nicolai
 
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Electric cars don't have a big (outside temperature related) range issue once they've warmed up the battery pack, and the operation of the motors and even of extracting power from the battery pack heats the pack up and keeps it warm. So if you pre warm the battery pack, or start off from a warm place (garage) then the range issues for cars are largely negated. The problem is with extracting energy, both in quantity and in rate, from a cold battery.

Cars have the obvious problem that you tend to park them in places where they have no external energy source so they get cold. Some electric cars improve the effectiveness of energy extraction from the battery by first using a bit of battery power to warm the battery, thereby getting more stored energy out of it later. In very cold places, it's common to plug in the car engine block heater to avoid the entire vehicle cooling down too much when you park the car, and you can imagine this continuing for electric vehicles.

A (transport) aircraft parked on a ramp with ground power could warm itself up from ground power before using onboard batteries, and in flight there will be heat from the motors (and air compressors, and so on) that can be used to keep batteries (and passengers) warm. Trivially, connect the heat-reject side of the air cycle machines to the batteries via a heat transfer loop and you'll warm the batteries while you keep the passengers supplied with air.

Transport aircraft in very remote places might need to self-heat their batteries, but the analogy these days is having to start and run the APU before boarding to provide passenger light and ventilation if you're at an airport too small to have ground power and conditioned air, and taking the fuel hit for it. The electric jet starting at the cold regional airport in the morning would need to heat itself up to get started as well.

Obviously, ground power to recharge the aircraft would have to be available - just like you need fuel to be available today.
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