PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Cruise altitude for electric airplanes.
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Old 29th Dec 2018, 14:48
  #28 (permalink)  
meleagertoo
 
Join Date: Mar 2018
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Well, you gonna be waiting an awful long time before anyone comes up with an aeroplane that can manage any sort of credibly useful performance to compare with conventionally fueled ones.
Even longer for airline size and performance, barring a revolutionary and to-date unanticipated breakthrough in battery technology or realisation of fuel cells.
It's a simple matter of energy density - how much energy can be stored in the space available. Currently batteries lag two orders of magnitude behind fossil fuels in this.
LiIon batteries currently stand in the range of .4 to .8 MJ/Kg. Jet A1 is 48. That's one hundred times more.
Certainly some necessarily small future aerodynamic and weight effciencies will narrow the gap slightly (small because those sciences are pretty much at peak already)
Batteries got some catching up to do!
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