Originally Posted by
Pilot DAR
The time will come, but right now the investment in a costly aircraft which must sit idle and change hours per minutes of flying is difficult to justify for a working plane.
I think that the time is now. It seems that the usual limit on recharging time is the capacity of the charger. The batteries can take it Captain.
e.g. for fastest charging in the case of a Tesla you use a DC supply that bypasses the internal Charger(s) in the vehicle. 400 V DC as I recall.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipistrel_Alpha_Trainer
"It has energy for one flight hour plus reserves, and can recharge in 45 minutes or have its batteries replaced in 5 minutes"
https://electrek.co/2018/11/08/porsc...harging-250kw/
"Porsche claims that the
800V chargers can charge the battery pack to 80% in about 15 minutes"
I suspect that you need to slow down for the last bit as the batteries approach full charge.
The deal is done.
Another deal -
Tesla recently bought Maxwell Technologies - "Maxwell claims this could boost battery capacity to 300 Wh/kg, a 20% jump over the best available electric-car batteries." They say it just needs productionised.
This is interesting - Blown wing to reduce stall speed and allow much higher wing loading for cruise efficiency.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_E-Fan
Also the Pipistrel above "has 277 pounds (126 kg) of
LiPo cells, however the water cooled electric motor weighs 11 kg". This allows much more power to be available for a short time for a small weight penalty. e.g. At present a twin engine helicopter carries around a spare gas turbine all the time for the case where one engine fails. A spare engine in the Pipistrel would only weigh 11 kg! (Of course perhaps an 80hp gas turbine only weighs 11kg - I am not sure?). There seems the possibility of hybrid aircraft where say gas turbines are used for cruise and electric propulsion added for take-off and landing.
A lot of development going on for sure.