ZeroAvia Has New Airplane, New Motor

Dean Sigler Announcements, Electric Powerplants, Fuel Cells, hydrogen, Hydrogen Fuel, Sustainable Aviation Leave a Comment

ZeroAvia has taken delivery of a 76-seat Bombardier* Q400 airplane from Alaska Airlines.  The craft could become a test bed for ZeroAvia’s modular HyperCore motors and hydrogen fuel systems.  The Q400 will carry four times the number of passengers of the company’s current Dornier 228 twin-engine test aircraft – already having made five successful test flights. ZeroAvia proclaims, “The future of flight is renewable hydrogen,” and explains with a mission statement.  “From 20 seat regional trips to over 100 seat long-distance flights, ZeroAvia enables scalable, sustainable aviation by replacing conventional engines with hydrogen-electric powertrains.” Two Dorniers, one in the United Kingdom and one in Hollister, California, are undergoing test flights (five so far in the Cotswolds in England) or awaiting FAA approval for such flights in Hollister. Acquiring the Bombardier brought a lot of attention to the Everett, Washington area recently, where ZeroAvia has a development center.  Governor Jay Inslee came to inspect the project Q400 and prophecy about an increasingly …

Sonex and Gabriel DeVault Partner on Electric Kitplane

Dean Sigler Announcements, Batteries, Electric Aircraft Components, Electric Powerplants, Sustainable Aviation Leave a Comment

Sonex and Gabriel DeVault have partnered to create an electric kitplane, marketing components for a different type of powerplant.  Sonex has been in the kitplane business since 1998 (having built from a decade’s-old earlier company) and Gabriel DeVault has been working with the electrification of aircraft for a decade.  Combining their expertise, we have a kit built path toward an inexpensive electric kitplane. Gabriel commutes a lot by air, traversing the globe between his home in Watsonville, California and Cranfield, England for work on Zero Avia’s electrification of Dornier 228s – one in each country.  He flies between Watsonville and Hollister, California in his Zero Motorcycle powered eXenos, a kit built product from Sonex Aircraft in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.  Before that, he flew a Mark Beierle eGull powered with a Zero motor.  Gabriel was instrumental in the design and manufacturing of that motor, making him a bona fide expert on the powerplant. His experience with the eXenos has led Sonex to …

Massless Batteries for Aircraft?

Dean Sigler Batteries, Electric Aircraft Materials, Sustainable Aviation Leave a Comment

What if the weight of the batteries in an electric airplane could virtually disappear?  Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden have come up with an improved structural battery that exceeds the results of earlier research.  So-called “massless batteries,” although not as energy dense as cylindrical or pouch lithium-ion batteries, could be worthy substitutes. The idea of making airplanes from materials that would provide energy from their inherent properties has been of interest for years.  Your editor wrote an article on “The Grand Unified Airplane” for Kitplanes magazine in 2013 based on the idea of combining solar power, piezoelectric flexing of wings, and structural batteries.  The ultimate goal was to create a machine that would move through the air on the energy of flight itself.  This might seem an unreachable fantasy, but material scientists are bringing us closer to the dream. Headlining their report with a rather non-academic boast, Chalmers University promotes its, “Big breakthrough for ’massless’ energy …

Structural Battery Doubles Flight Time

Dean Sigler Batteries, Electric Aircraft Components, Sustainable Aviation Leave a Comment

Structural batteries, structures which are also their own energy storage devices, are being looked at with increasing frequency.  Your editor has long been a proponent of integrating aircraft structures and the means of generating, storing and releasing energy – something he calls “the Grand Unified Airplane.”  Joe Faust, a hang glider pioneer and designer of energy-gathering kites, put the idea of including batteries in an airplane’s structure into your editor’s mind.  This video from the 1970’s shows Joe was not only athletic and adventurous – he was clean.  His Wikipedia page is even more fascinating. 40 Years Later at Case Western Following Joe Faust’s lead, Case Western professor Vikas Prakash has demonstrated the potential or structural energy storage at model size.  In what was described as an “otherwise unremarkable” craft, Prakash inserted “structural battery” components inside the six-foot wingspan on his unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Pre- insertion, the craft had been able to fly for 91 minutes before the batteries …

Thinner than Kleenex®, as Powerful as the Sun

Dean Sigler Electric Powerplants, Sustainable Aviation Leave a Comment

David L. Chandler of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) News Office reports that an MIT research team headed by Jeffrey Grossman has found a way to make sheets that push “towards the ultimate power conversion from a material” for solar power.  His team has managed to fabricate molecule-thick photovoltaic sheets which could pack hundreds of times more power per weight than conventional solar cells. Senior author of a new paper on the team’s study in Nano Letters, Grossman found that despite the interest in two-dimensional materials such as graphene – only an atom thick – few have studied their potential for solar applications.  Grossman says, “They’re not only OK, but it’s amazing how well they do.” Stacking sheets of graphene and materials such as molybdenum disulfide would make solar cells with one to two percent efficiency in converting sunlight to electricity.  That seems disappointingly low compared to the 15 to 20 percent efficiency of commercially available silicon solar cells. …

The Two-Day Electric Airplane

Dean Sigler Electric Powerplants, Sustainable Aviation 2 Comments

Imagine being confronted with a challenge to create an electric airplane in 48 hours, being filmed for much of those two days regardless of the frustrations or successes that come, and knowing that the entire adventure will be shown on the National Geographic Channel.   Robert Baslee’s Dream Fantasy ultralight, converted to electric power for a National Geographic TV series Robert Baslee, who runs Airdrome Aeroplanes in Holden, Missouri,  has the kinds of experience that makes such a challenge plausible.  He built four Nieuport fighters for the movie Flyboys in 52 days with a small, dedicated crew, for instance. His wife and he supplied vintage-looking aircraft to the making of the film Amelia.  He markets a growing range of WWI airplanes in full-size, 75- and 80-percent scale.  A full-scale Bleriot XI replica from his firm crossed the English Channel on the 100th anniversary of Louis Bleriot’s flight. Dick Starks writes regularly for Kitplanes magazine, and regales readers in the February 2013 issue …

Lifting Yourself by a Disappearing Thread

Dean Sigler Sustainable Aviation Leave a Comment

The University of Maryland announced the successful 11.4 second flight of an American human-powered helicopter with a female pilot – now the National record holder and successor to the first female flight on such a machine – 17 years ago. In 1994, your editor attended a human-powered aircraft symposium in Seattle at the Boeing Museum of Flight. Paul MacCready signed my copy of Gossamer Odyssey and I was official observer (for Chris Roper of the Royal Aeronautical Society) of the first female-powered helicopter flight.  Ward Griffiths, a svelte young thing from a local bike shop, cranked the very similar (to Gamera) thing into the air for 8.6 seconds – a first and a female record at that time.  A Japanese gentleman had done 15 seconds the day before and knocked the O. J. Simpson investigation off the front page of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.  Flights took place in the Boeing 777 preparation hangar, while the big jet spooled up and taxied around outside. …