Seattle’s Museum of Flight on Boeing Field will host a one-day event, Powering Imagination, an electric flight symposium organized by Erik Lindbergh, grandson of Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh. Presentations will be held in the William M. Allen Theater at the Museum, starting at 10:00 a.m. on Saturday, February 28 and ending at 5:00 p.m. Admission is free, but RSVP to cwilcox@museumofflight.org to guarantee a seat. Topics include an update on the NASA LEAPTech aircraft being designed and built by Joby Aviation and powered by Joby motors. This 20-motor (!) aircraft will achieve a high coefficient of lift from the motors that distribute thrust over the entire span. Eric Lindbergh will talk about the Quiet Flight Initiative, a multi-pronged approach to designing and crafting airplanes quiet enough to be flown over national parks, areas now off-limits to noisy overflights. This is one facet of Powering Imagination, the other two Electric Flight and Alternative Fuels. Erik promises video updates from Europe and an …
Alternair, X-Caps™ Teaming Up From Sky to Parking Lot
Stephen Boutenko, founder of Alternair, LLC and Karl Young, founder of Extreme Capacitors have found common cause in analyzing how best to make an electric Light Sport Aircraft (LSA) a possibility. Alternair’s Amp LSA was featured in a blog entry last year, and Karl Young’s work with ultracapacitors was the subject of his presentation at this year’s Electric Aircraft Symposium. Alternair has recently established a temporary design department in Prescott, Arizona (in association with Embry Riddle Aeronautical University) and is moving his manufacturing facility to Ashland, Oregon, where he hopes to begin production of the highly-sophisticated Amp. Although Amp will be developed around existing lithium-polymer battery technology, Young reports that his creation of high power/high energy ultracapacitors has demonstrated, “Around 0.9 mega Joules (250 Watt-hours per kilogram) in the lab,” with a goal of, “5 mega Joules (1,400 Wh/kg) for sport aviation.” Funding will spur further progress. Young explains, “We’ve already found ways to improve our existing design,” and …
Taking it to eXtremes
“If I were to make a prediction, I’d think there’s a good chance that it is not batteries. But capacitors.” Karl Young, CEO of eXtreme Capacitor, Inc. started his presentation at the fifth annual Electric Aircraft Symposium with these words from Tesla Motor’s Elon Musk. The reference to capacitors superseding batteries as an energy source for electric cars came from Musk’s address at the Cleantech Forum in San Francisco on 16 March 2011. Young’s talk before the April 29 gathering in Santa Rosa, California detailed the double-layer supercapacitors his company produces, and what Young feels are the advantages these have over “traditional” lithium and other batteries. He is “trying to overcome the issues of batteries,” including, according to Young, their weight, slow charge and discharge times, their short operational lifetimes (typically 500 to 3,000 cycles), and their toxicity and flammability. Young contrasted that with the specifications for his eXtreme X-Cap™ “double-layer capacitor-based energy storage technology,” which can last through over …