Dr. Seeley sent this along today. On May 1, 2, 2015, the world’s leading experts will converge for the 9th Annual CAFE Electric Aircraft Symposium in the beautiful Sonoma Wine Country. The confirmed presenters include: Airbus on “The e-Fan Design” Michigan’s Satki3 CEO Ann Marie Sastry on “Solid State Energy Storage” Italy’s Eric Raymond of GFC I Team-eGenius on “Sunstar and the SunSeeker Duo” Slovenia’s Tine Tomazic of GFC I Team Pipistrel USA on “Converting GA Aircraft to Electric Propulsion” UCR’s Zach Favors on “Beach Sand for Long Cycle Life Li-ion Batteries” Northrop-Grumman’s J. Philip Barnes on “Regenerative Electric Flight” NASA’s Dr. Eric Darcy on “Battery Safety” Ford/Ricardo’s Neil Johnson on “Li-ion BMS & Gauging” Launchpoint’s Michael Ricci on “Propulsion by Wire” Also expected are Northrop-Grumman’s Barnaby Wainfan on “Low Aspect Ratio Electric Aircraft”, Ray Pekar of Autoliv on “Airbags for Impact, Rafts and EMAS”, Bose Automotive Suspension lead Neal Lackritz on “Active Suspension for Sky Taxis” and Jeff DeGrange of …
A Two-motor Electric German Ultralight – Made in the USA
If you are young enough and in good physical condition, dragging a 100-pound ultralight airplane to the top of a hill and hopping off allows an incredibly low operating cost for a very green aviation experience. As one gets older, this kind of flight is still attractive, but some form of landing gear or training wheels, and quite often, some form of motive power, become necessary. The German ULF-1 has been around for several years, prompting several builders to put their own distinct look on the vintage-looking sailplane. In fact, over 40 of the microlift-capable craft have been built from plans supplied by designer Dieter Reich. ULF-1 is a highly capable vehicle, with the longest flight so far lasting six hours and the furthest distance flown around 140 kilometers (87 miles). The original was constructed by Heiner Neumann, and each example built since has incorporated the usual homebuilder’s touches to each new version. This Russian link gives a view of …
Making Hydrogen Abundant and Inexpensive
The quandary in producing and using hydrogen is that it’s the most common element in the universe and the oldest, having been formed within a micro-second of the Big Bang. Despite that, it’s always associated with other materials, and to use pure hydrogen usually requires extracting from the material in which it’s found. Water is the most common source for hydrogen, but as noted before, getting hydrogen out of water is harder than it looks. As shown in earlier blog, various techniques have been tried to make this extraction, some seemingly close to providing usable quantities at reasonable prices. Dr. Daniel Nocera of MIT and later Harvard used a two-catalyst system to pull oxygen and hydrogen from water. State University of New York at Buffalo researchers dropped nano-sized particles of silicon in water, with resulting bubbles of hydrogen escaping in large enough quantities to power portable devices. Although the Alka-Seltzer-like reaction seems to have promise, Elena Rozhkova, a scientist at …
Lithium-Sulfur Cells Wrapped in Graphene
Graphene is science fiction made real – a one-atom thick layer of hexagonal arrays of carbon which weigh next to nothing and are stronger than any other material on earth. Wrap a layer of this stuff around “a novel multifunctional sulfur electrode that combines an energy storage unit and electron/ion transfer networks,” and you get “an extremely promising electrode structure design for rechargeable lithium-sulfur batteries.” Lithium-sulfur batteries have the promise of reaching a theoretical specific energy density “approaching 2,600 Watt-hours per kilogram (Wh kg-1),” compared to currently available specific energy densities for lithium-ion cells of 130-220 Wh kg-1. Researchers led by Dr. Vasant Kumar at the University of Cambridge and Professor Renjie Chen at the Beijing Institute of Technology worked to overcome the shortcomings of lithium-sulfur batteries now under development – a “fading” of the sulfur through a series of reactions with the anode, electrolyte, and lithium cathode, a kind of “shuttling” between these battery components, and the small number …
As Common As It Gets – But Hard to Get
Since Michael Faraday first split water into hydrogen and oxygen in 1820, scientists have puzzled over how to do this economically in large quantities. The Blog continues to run stories about “artificial leaves,” low-energy approaches to dividing the hydrogen in water from the oxygen, and doing so economically. The current most widely-used approach to capturing hydrogen is pulling it from natural gas via several processes. The Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy explains the process on its web site. Steam-methane Reforming In steam-methane reforming, “high-temperature steam (700°C–1,000°C) is used to produce hydrogen from a methane source, such as natural gas. In steam-methane reforming, methane reacts with steam under 3–25 bar pressure (1 bar = 14.5 psi) in the presence of a catalyst to produce hydrogen, carbon monoxide, and a relatively small amount of carbon dioxide. Steam reforming is endothermic—that is, heat must be supplied to the process for the reaction to proceed.” In a “’water-gas shift reaction,’ the carbon …
Will VW Take on Tesla?
Volkswagen just bought a five-percent stake in a startup company called QuantumScape, a commercial spinoff of work done at Stanford University’s Nanoscale Prototyping Laboratory for Energy Conversion and Storage. The Labroratory’s head, Fritz B. Prinz, Finmeccanica Professor of Engineering and Robert Bosch Chairman of Mechanical Engineering, explains: “Our team creates, models, and prototypes nanoscale structures to understand the physics of electrical energy conversion and storage. We are exploring the relation between size, composition, and the kinetics of charge transfer. We are also interested in learning from nature, in particular by studying the electron transport chain in plant cells.” (Note that the QuantumScape web site is curiously without detail, showing only four pretty pictures and making three or four non-controversial statements. The most information comes on the Contact link.) Whatever they are doing, the Lab has caught the interest of not only Volkswagen’s CEO Martin Winterkorn, but produced a flood of often speculative articles from Bloomberg, EV World and other sources, …
Hydrogen: Are We There Yet?
Probably not, but we are edging closer to when H2-powered vehicles (including small aircraft) might be as ubiquitous as Prius’s or Leafs – but there are significant barriers to overcome. Fuel cell-powered aircraft might make sense eventually from a physical and economic sense, and while new technologies show promise for EV use, hydrogen power still has barriers to overcome before we’re able to exploit the environmental benefits of hydrogen power. The appeal of a fuel cell to burn hydrogen and leave behind only a light mist of water still dazzles, but teasingly eludes us, not so much from a technical standpoint – but from environmental and economic ones. Two Most Practical Fuel Cells for Transportation Fuel cells come in many varieties, with proton exchange membrane (PEM) and solid oxide fuel cells (SOFC) types heading the list for practical vehicle use. PEM cells, according to Fuelcell.org, “operate at relatively low temperatures, have high power density, and can vary output quickly to …
A Cheerfully Acknowledged Chastisement
If one writes things, occasional slip-ups creep in. In this case, an unchallenged assertion of who is “first” drew this kind email from Klaus Savier, builder, tuner and pilot of a very slippery Long-Eze. He’s flown from California to Florida and back on good old fossil fuels (with one fuel stop each way) in his highly modified Long-Eze and achieved 30 miles per gallon at 250 miles per hour true airspeed. It would be interesting to see how little fuel the airplane would consume at Green Flight Challenge airspeeds. His demonstrated 0.36 pounds of fuel per horsepower-hour is claimed by Klaus to be 40-percent lower than the commonly seen 0.60 pounds per horsepower-hour that engines without his Light Speed Engineering ignition system and more standard propellers manage. It shows what a determined experimenter can accomplish. His letter follows: Hello Dean, Thank you for the nice article you wrote in Kitplanes a while ago. So far that was the only publication …
It’s (Green Aviation) Giving Tuesday, 2014
If you’ve managed to survive Gray Thursday, Black Friday, and a weekend of NFL games stuffed with blandishments to entice you to the nearest mall (Thanksgiving happened in there somewhere), you’re forgiven if you flinch at yet one more presumptuous tug at your purse strings. But we’re talking about helping pioneers on the edge of green technology, crafting the stuff dreams are made of – and making those dreams a reality. On this Giving Thursday, think about contributing to the dream makers who are taking us into a better future of flight. We share a few suggestions here. Solar Flight Eric and Irena Raymond are the first family of solar-powered flight, now cruising Italian skies in the world’s first two-seat sun-powered airplane, the Duo. To assist with further development of their splendid aircraft, including Sunstar, a high-altitude surveillance and communications craft, the couple is selling a beautiful calendar featuring their aircraft. For $37 US or 29 euros plus shipping, you …
Layering Astonishingly Light Materials to Make Electricity from Light
Researchers at the Vienna University of Technology have combined two semiconductor materials, each only three atomic layers thick. Adding one semiconducting layer of the photoactive crystal tungsten diselenide to a layer of molybdenum disulphide, and “creating a designer-material that may be used in future low-cost solar cells.” Having worked with graphene, that two-dimensional, atom-thick material that promises much for structures, batteries and solar cells, Thomas Mueuller, assistant professor of photonics, and his team “acquired the necessary know-how to handle, analyze and improve ultra-thin layers by working with graphene.” The team applied their lessons learned with graphene to combining two ultra-thin semiconductor layers and are now studying their optoelectronic properties. Mueller explains, ““Quite often, two-dimensional crystals have electronic properties that are completely different from those of thicker layers of the same material.” In their present study, the Tungsten diselenide, a semiconductor consisting of three atomic layers; one layer of tungsten sandwiched between two layers of selenium atoms. Mueller adds, “We had …