benet,
you are pretty far off in all of your opening premises:
- Electric motors are a lot lighter than piston engines
Not at all true. Typical piston engines are about 1/3 the weight of an equivilent electric motor. For example, a 150 HP electric motor weighs 1350 lbs, while a 180 HP Lycoming weighs 257 lbs. Even if we assume that we could get an electric motor to trim 3/4 of its weight, it would still be far heavier than a piston engine.
here are some facts
http://www.lycoming.textron.com/main...uide/heli.html
http://www.tecowestinghouse.com/PDF/Prem_Eff_ODP(05.03).pdf
- Electric motors are way more efficient
Hardly electric motors are not engines, they are actually a form of transmission. they need raw energy to work, unlike engines, which create energy in their process. Since you don't include how the electricity is made into your assumption, you believe that the electric motor wastes less, but that is actually quite false. since someone somewhere had to make the electricity, you must count that inefficiency in, and so far, no total process is much more efficient than a simple engine. Fuel cells are the exception, and should they work out in high capacity, there might be parity in the efficiency, but of course, the weight of the fuel cell must be counted in, and they are quite heavy in high power designs, so far.
- Startup, shutdown and carb icing wouldn't be problems any more
True, but then we'd have "relay freeze" or "spark jump" or some other set of problems! Remember what the side of Apollo 13 looked like when the fuel cell exploded?
- There would be a lot less moving parts, and reliability would be increased
See Above!
- The end result would be eco-friendly and very cheap to run!
Eco-Friendly, right. And cleaner clothes, smoother white teeth, with that fresh lemon scent!
The solution to electric air vehicles is very far off, mostly weight problems, mostly in the energy storage area. Fuel cells are the best solution, along with very light weight motors and lots and lots of development time and money.
A more likely solution is to make cheap electric power with reactors (fusion, perhaps) use the electricity to split water into hydrogen, compress it into liquid and run gas turbines in the flying machines on that hydrogen with zero emissions