An engineer retired to southern Illinois farm country, Jerry Booker has designed and built several airplanes, his latest being the Red Tail Hawk, a Part 103-compliant self-launching ultralight sailplane. He has flown 15 times in his new creation, maintaining meticulous notes and downloading data for review by others. His empirical approach to testing the limits of his electric powerplant (a Randall Fisher 18 horsepower brushed motor/controller combination) and airframe represent a thorough and careful examination of a type of airplane that other homebuilders might be able to make with currently available systems. Jerry’s flight reports are dispassionate and carefully logged, following much of the approach and including many of the criteria developed over the years by the CAFE Foundation. He uses an EagleTree flight data recorder that was developed for model aircraft to track the ups, downs and other parameters of his flights. He checks his airspeed against an Etrex GPS. Jerry posts the results of each flight in the …
Dr. Eric Darcy, Building Better Batteries
Dr. Eric Darcy, the battery group leader at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas was selected last year as an Innovation Ambassador, and worked with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Colorado to devise mathematical models for lithium ion battery performance. This was part of NASA’s Innovative Partnerships Program, which allows some of NASA’s most talented scientists and engineers to work at several of America’s leading innovative external research and development organizations. NASA explains that the “inaugural group of ambassadors is initiating the planned annual program targeting opportunities to create NASA partnerships and new innovation sources outside of the traditional aerospace field. During assignments of up to one year, the NASA ambassadors will share their own expertise while learning about innovative products, processes and business models. After returning to NASA, the ambassador may share new ideas with co-workers and implement innovations within their organizations.” Dr. Darcy’s work has far-reaching consequences, especially since it involves the design of batteries …
ENFICA-FC – A Speed Record for Hydrogen
Professor Guilio Romeo of the Politecnico de Torino, Italy is a man of many firsts. Last year, his team fielded Skyspark, a Pioneer 300 powered with an electric motor fed by batteries. This year, in a totally new development, Professor Romeo coordinated the activities leading to a successful hydrogen-powered electric aircraft, and set a world speed record to top off that accomplishment. The Skyleader 150 Zero CO2 light sport aircraft, built by JIHLAVAN airplanes, Ltd. in the Czech Republic, was fitted with Intelligent Energy proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cells from the United Kingdom, an inverter and power management system by Italy’s Mavel Elletronica, and a motor at least partially designed by the University of Pisa, Italy. Tanks and a high-pressure fuel delivery system were created by the UK’s Air Products Limited. Labeled ENFICA-FC (Environmentally Friendly Inter City Aircraft Powered by Fuel Cells) the airplane was actually the fourth machine to fly on hydrogen power, the first being a Boeing conversion of a …
Where Are They Now? Part Two
This blog has been following two intrepid groups exploring new geographical and technical terrain. Both have been slowed by mechanical difficulties and sometime bureaucratic entanglements, but are making up for lost time. London’s Imperial College Racing Green Endurance (RGE) team is driving an electric supercar from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska to Ushuaia, the world’s most southernmost city. Their trek down the Pan-American Highway is about 70-percent done and mobile again following their recent enforced layover in Quito, Ecuador. They have been stopped 29 times by police in North, Central, and South America, with many stops more to satisfy the curiosity of the local gendarmes than to enforce repentance of negligence toward the traffic code. Their Thunder Sky batteries and EVO motors have been performing reliably, pushing the car 250 miles or more per day on their eventful voyage. To make up for time lost in repairs, they are pressing on, as attested to in their latest Twitter tweet, “We are in Machala! 320 …
Green Flight Challenge: It Might Look Like a Quickie…
But it will be the Feuling Green Flight Challenger, an entirely new iteration of the Quickie “formula” if Gene Sheehan, Vic Turner, Luke Leatherman and Allon McBee have their way. Created in the wake of the Vari-Eze’s and Long-Eze’s of the early 1970’s, the original Quickie was an 18-horsepower Onan industrial engine-powered irreducible flying machine with great speed for its low power and unbelievable fuel economy. The team’s GFC Challenger is electric, and a far cry from its cast iron past – or the iron-horse Harley-Davidson motorcycles that are part of its surroundings. “Feuling” comes from the high-performance motorcycle and automobile developer who started the company bearing his name. Jim Feuling had over 100 patents to his name, worked with the big names in the racing world, and created a 500 mile-per-gallon engine (at 55 miles per hour) for Honda’s streamliner and fielded a record-breaking motorcycle streamliner that clocked 333.847 mph on the Bonneville Salt Flats on October 20th, 1999. …
Go Skynch Yourself – And Smile About It
Jack Lambie, an early hang-glider pilot, wrote in a mid-seventies’ Soaring Magazine of a dream cross-country using ultralight sailplanes with self-launching devices that allowed high launches from flat ground when foot launching was not practical. Lambie would be proud of recent developments in Denmark. Three years ago, we first noted the Skynch, a paraglider (potentially hang glider) self-launching device under development. Then it seemed to disappear from view, only to re-emerge as a fully-developed electric winch with a remote for the pilot. The self-controlled nature of the setup allows a pilot to literally pull him or herself into the blue. The video, which the Skynch people do not allow to be embedded here, gives a convincing demonstration of the system’s ease of use and functionality. Admittedly a bit pricey, the basic winch costs 6,700 Euros (about $9,300), and allows tows for 85 kilogram (187 pound) pilots on 1,000 meters (about 3,200 feet) of line. Interestingly, a 100 kg (220 pound) pilot could be launched …
A Thousand-Fold Point of Light
Shortly after reading of MIT’s 100-fold breakthrough in light-gathering capabilities for solar cells, we saw the news about a one-thousand-fold increase claimed by Rice University researchers. Professor of physics and astronomy Doug Natelson announced the findings of his research group, which includes his graduate student Dan Ward, and colleagues in Germany and Spain. In his blog, Natelson stated, “My student (with theorist collaborators) had a paper published online in Nature Nanotechnology yesterday, and this gives me an excuse to talk about using metal nanostructures as optical antennas. The short version: using metal electrodes separated by a sub-nanometer gap as a kind of antenna, we have been able to get local enhancement of the electromagnetic intensity by roughly a factor of a million (!), and we have been able to determine that enhancement experimentally via tunneling measurements.” In a brief discussion with this reporter, Natelson deflated any ideas that this technology would be powering up solar cells in the near future. …
The Light at the End of the Funnel
In some exciting news that could make several quantum leaps in solar cell performance, Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have announced a hundred-fold increase in light gathering capabilities for solar cells. If a cell were able to exploit this increase, an aircraft such as the Solar Impulse could fly on 120 solar cells instead of the 12,000 now spread across its over 200-foot wingspan. We’ve reported on carpet-like light-capturing formats for increasing solar cell output, but the MIT approach funnels light down a multi-carbon nanotube filament, boosting the output of the “tiny” solar cell at the bottom. MIT’s press release explains the outcome. “’Instead of having your whole roof be a photovoltaic cell, you could have little spots that were tiny photovoltaic cells, with antennas that would drive photons into them,’ says Michael Strano, the Charles and Hilda Roddey Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering and leader of the research team. “Strano and his students describe their new carbon nanotube antenna, …
Solar Impulse – Swiss Pride
Andre’ Borschberg, CEO of the Solar Impulse project, has been flying the giant airplane over many scenic and civic sites in Switzerland, crossing from its home field at Payerne to Geneva International Airport on September 21, and then returning the same day to Payerne. The next day, Borschberg cruised to Zurich International Airport and returned to the plane’s home base. As quoted in the project’s press release, Borschberg was happy about the chance to view Switzerland from his rare and lofty perch. “’These flights are just amazing! Thanks to the plane’s low speed, I was able to discover Switzerland from a completely new angle, fully taking in the beauty of our country!’ said André Borschberg, CEO and Co-founder of Solar Impulse, from the cockpit of HB SIA in Zurich. ‘The Swiss solar flights represent a major step forward for our team, taking us away from our customary airspace. We have learned to work together with international airports, merging in with …
Launching on a Leaf Blower and a Hacker
Paul Dewhurst and Dr. Paul Robertson, chronicled in an earlier entry about their simultaneous electric ultralight flights last year, have created another first, a parallel hybrid motorglider launch. The truncated flight of their Alatus took place on September 9, 2010 at Sywell Aerodrome, between Coventry and Cambridge north of London. Dewhurst notes, “Flight was quite short though (around 1.5 minutes) after the controller suffered a bit of tantrum complete with sparks! Rework [is] in process and we hope to have a rather longer flight soon.” Replacing the Lynch unit normally used in the Alatus’s motorized version with an unspecified 76cc, 2.8 kilowatt (3.75 horsepower) internal combustion four-stroke leaf blower unit paralleled with a Hacker A200 12 kilowatt (16 horsepower) large model airplane motor approximates the Lynch motor’s output. Despite that, the airplane seems reluctant to leave the ground in the video. Dewhurst explains, “Ground roll is quite long on the film, not entirely due to low thrust – it was uphill slightly …