With only half the month gone and the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb scheduled on its last week, June 2014 has seen records crumble at the Isle of Man TT and hybrid electrical technology dominate at the 80th running of the 24 Hours of Le Mans. The electric part of the classic road race on the tight little island between Britain and Northern Ireland saw new records for the 37 mile spin around the southern roadways – like the Le Man circuit, otherwise public roads usually dominated by farm vehicles and passenger cars. Ohio State University’s Buckeye Racing Team ran a modified Honda CBR1000RR frame with a motor by Roman Susnik, the Slovenian who also designed the motors used in the Pipistrel G2 self-launching motorglider. They ran a respectable third place, a great accomplishment for a college team up against the might of the winning Honda Mugen. John McGuinness rode that $4.3 million racer to set a lap record of …
EAS VIII: Precision Autonomous Synchrophasing of Electric Propellers
Dr. Krish Ahuja, Regents Professor at Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) helped attendees at the eighth annual Electric Aircraft Symposium understand an unusual set of problems by starting off with an explanation of acoustics for non-acousticians. His credentials, impressive as they are, are more than matched by his ability to help those outside his specialty understand his discipline. According to his Georgia Tech web page, “Dr. Ahuja is a former associate editor of the AIAA Journal and also a former Chairman of the AIAA Aeroacoustics Technical Committee. Dr. Ahuja has authored or co-authored over 180 technical articles or reports on a range of topics including acoustic shielding, fan noise, active flow control, flow/acoustic interactions, jet noise, cavity noise, automobile noise, sonic boom research, psychoacoustics, high-temperature fiber optics strain gauges, acoustic transducers, active noise control, tilt rotor noise, source separation, acoustic fatigue, duct acoustics, computational aeroacoustics, innovative flow visualization techniques, tornado signatures, rapid charging of batteries and others.” He ran …
NTSB Releases Initial Report, Recommendations on Dreamliner Battery Fires
January 2013 was a time of great concern for operators of the Boeing 787 “Dreamliner.” On the 7th, an empty 787 operated by Japan Airlines experienced a fire in the main battery pack. On the 16th, an All Nippon Airways 787 made an emergency landing and evacuated everyone on board on emergency slides after the flight crew responded to a computer warning of smoke inside one of the electrical compartments. Other incidents pointed to issues in the use and transport of lithium-ion batteries such as those used in the big Boeing. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has directed several recommendations to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), derived from the agency’s ongoing investigation of the Japan Airlines incident only, at this time. Certainly the ongoing investigation of the All Nippon flight incident will merit a separate report. Despite the fact that many industry “insiders” have offered opinions as to how Boeing should have designed and constructed the two lithium-ion battery …
EAS VIII: Making Small Airplanes Ride Smoothly
Dr. C. P. (Case) van Dam of the University of California at Davis provided some counter-intuitive pointers on making small airplanes ride more smoothly to participants at the eighth annual Electric Aircraft Symposium in late April. His solutions for ride quality enhancement in small airplanes are an essential ingredient in making electric Sky Taxis a plausible reality. Because at least initially many electric aircraft are constrained to long wing spans and light wing loadings, they are subject to “perturbations of significant magnitude to be unacceptable.” These disruptions of the intended altitude and direction of the aircraft can be more upsetting to passengers than to the aircraft itself, but van Dam had several suggestions to alleviate the vertical and lateral accelerations that passengers perceive as bumpy air. He had explained the possible need for a gust alleviation system in his 2008 Electric Aircraft Symposium talk, something he felt even then would be necessary, “In order for these vehicles to achieve acceptable …
Load-Bearing Supercapacitors
What if your battery served also as a wing or a fuselage? Several current efforts converge on creating batteries or supercapacitors that could function as structural elements in electric vehicles. We’ve reported on this before, with efforts by Dr. Emil Greenhalgh at Imperial College London and associated work by Volvo to make car components from the type of energy storing sandwich structure he developed. Your editor’s article on the “Grand Unified Airplane” in the July 2013 issue of Kitplanes magazine advanced the idea that such structures, coupled with graphene’s projected capabilities to collect solar energy, could lead to a self-powering aircraft. (In researching the current entry, he found that his idea had been done at model scale by BAE.) Reports from two universities show that others are working toward making that dream less than an idle fantasy. Researchers at Vanderbilt University are making headway toward creating a “Multifunctional Load-Bearing Solid-State Supercapacitor,” as titled in the American Chemical Society’s journal, Nano …
EAS VIII: Klaus Ohlmann Conquers Everest
Klaus Ohlmann says the sailplanes and solar-powered aircraft in which he has set several world records are powered by a “gravitational engine with an external fusion reactor.” He has been on a sun-stoked roll the last few years. His recounting of the epic journey first to fly a Stemme motorglider from Germany to Katmandu, and then to conquer Mount Everest in a sailplane, kept the eighth annual Electric Aircraft Symposium audience enthralled. That feat alone would be enough for admiration, but his seemingly never-ending series of adventures provoke a bit of awe. He is a member of the Mountain Wave Project (MWP), a group which explores high-altitude weather systems to verify theoretical considerations. As stated in the MWP’s web site, it is “a project of the scientific and meteorological panel of OSTIV (Organisation Scientifique et Technique du Vol à Voile) …conceived during an OSTIV seminar 1998 in Serres/France by René Heise and Klaus Ohlmann and attracted several enthusiastic scientists/pilots since.” He holds the world’s …
Solar Impulse 2 Makes Premier Flight
Solar Impulse HB-SIB, the second aircraft from the program headed by Andre’ Borschberg and Bertrand Piccard, took to the skies early this morning piloted by Markus Scherdel. Taking off from Payerne Airport at 3:38 Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) Solar Impulse 2 climbed to a randomly orbiting path within a 20-mile compass of the airfield to the southwest, Lake Neuchatel to the north, and Belleville to the northeast. At about 4:01 GMT, and about 5,300 feet, Scherdel reported a slight vibration and briefly leveled off until determining that it was probably an aerodynamic vibration – not a motor issue, but possibly from a hatch door. He continued climbing and performed a bank angle test of 5° at varying airspeeds and “a steady heading sideslip” to determine that controllability and stability were OK. At 4:47 GMT the team’s web site reported, “Flight Director is quite happy: no problem has been detected on the electrical and propulsion system, stability of airplane is good. …
Sunseeker Duo Goes Dual
Irena Raymond became the first passenger of a solar-powered airplane recently, even taking over control of the Sunseeker Duo she and husband Eric built over the last several years. Her thoughts provoke awe and envy. “Flying the Duo, skimming the white fluffy clouds from above and playing on the sky, I feel like a bird. No limitations, a pure freedom. It’s so quiet! Compared to a normal airplane, it’s like night and day. You need a very good headset in every other powered airplane, but in this airplane you can speak normally even when the motor is running full power, no headset needed. It is unbelievable.” Eric provides some hard data to complement Irena’s understandably poetic words. “I am expanding the flight envelope, so far up to 13,000 feet and 85 mph. My heaviest passenger… is 85 kilograms (187 pounds), and we were able to climb up to 12,500 feet. 80 percent of the solar cells are hooked up.” Responding to …
EAS VIII: John Langford Shares a Wide Range of Skills
Dr. John S. Langford is the Chairman and CEO of Aurora Flight Sciences Corporation, which he founded in 1989. He has Bachelor’s, Master’s and Doctoral degrees from MIT in Aeronautics and other disciplines. While at MIT, he led a series of human-powered aircraft projects, culminating in the Daedalus Project, which in 1988 made a 72-mile flight between the Greek islands of Crete and Santorini. He was just named 2014 winner of the National Aeronautics Association’s Cliff Henderson Trophy, awarded for “…a living individual, group of individuals, or an organization whose vision, leadership or skill made a significant and lasting contribution to the promotion and advancement of aviation and aerospace in the United States.” He shares the honor with earlier winners including Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Lieutenant General James H. Doolittle, Senator Barry M. Goldwater, Clarence L. “Kelly” Johnson, and Scott Crossfield, among others. He started his presentation, “The Manned Unmanned Aircraft: Where the UAV Revolution is Headed,” explaining that aviation growth …
Three Battery Technologies with Great Potential
It’s a good week when at least three battery developments show promise for electric vehicle use in the near future. One advanced lithium-ion battery from France, a dual-carbon battery from Japan, and a supercapacitor that one can wrap around one’s finger comprise the trio. French Lithium-Tin Dioxide “Synthesizing nanoparticles of tin dioxide (SnO2) in the pores of a carbonaceous material,” researchers at the Institute of Materials Science of Mulhouse and Charles Gerhardt Institute of Montpellier, part of an electrochemical energy storage consortium called RS2E, have found the material to have “remarkable properties.” Their work is the subject of a patent and published in the journal, Advanced Energy Materials. Researchers, hoping to obtain better performance that that achieved with carbon electrodes, tested combinations of nickel (Ni), iron (Fe), cobalt (Co), and other materials before hitting on tin dioxide as a material of choice. All have (theretically) far greater electrochemical storage capacity than graphite, but expand and contract during charging and discharging of the battery, …