Originally Posted by
jimjim1
Thanks, my message was a bit too obtuse, I should have spelled it all out. I think I mentioned the nexus further above.
All interesting stuff. It seems that helicopters of the current configuration may not be around for too long. Depends of course on the exact way the numbers work out but it would seem that a lot of the single points of failure of helicopters could be removed by the use of electric transmissions.
By the Way Electric Transmissions are not new.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel...iesel_vehicles
"In 1914, world's first functional diesel–electric railcars were produced"
not to be the naysayer, but there is no way they put this on a very pricey 429 unless they absolutely had to. Meaning the single engine Bell products likely didn’t have the electrical capacity to drive the generators and associated electrical claptrap. I’m betting this was because they needed to add huge generators which would push the prototype into a twin engine beast and explain the odd choice of putting this on one of the more expensive Bell variants instead of A 505 or 407.
That doesn’t account for any eventual complexity required to certify the system. Keep in mind there are zero fly by wire civil certified helicopters in existence. Adding an FBW system like this would have flight critical software, redundancy requirements all along the routing of the tail boom and a requirement for no “common mode” failures. That generally means 4 identical fans and motors would not be easily qualified with in flight critical applications because they were not designed for such a purpose.
I bet it is heavier than the system it replaces by a large margin... increases susceptibility to common mode critical failures like software, lightning or EMI.... and substantially less efficient from a pure energy transfer perspective... lots of physics to combat to prove me wrong here.
im glad Bell is investing some money in commercial space though. This seems like a real project as opposed to the FCX1 thing they showed a few years ago... so that’s nice.