The CAFE Foundation will hold its sixth Electric Aircraft Symposium on April 27 and 28, 2012 at the Flamingo Resort in Santa Rosa, California and at the Charles M. Schulz Sonoma County Airport, site of the Green Flight Challenge. Not only will there be a stellar lineup of speakers, but flying demonstrations of electric and hybrid aircraft, a first at any EAS. Jack Langelaan, team leader for the GFC-winning Electro Taurus G4 team, and Tine Tomazic from Pipistrel will share insights on the design and flight of the 403.5 epmpg aircraft. David Calley, Chief Technical Officer for Motor Excellence, will describe ideal low-RPM motors for electric aircraft, and Mark Moore from NASA’s Langley Research Center will share breakthroughs in distributed propulsion. And that’s all before the first coffee break! Typical of the packed schedules for all EAS’s, the rest of the presentations will fill your brain and lighten your spirit. Gene Sheehan will discuss his Quickie-like Feuling Green Flight Challenger …
Ready to Launch
LaunchPoint Technologies, Inc. announces the highest power to weight ratio of any known electric motor – seven horsepower for 1.4 pounds (635 grams) or five pounds per horsepower. As a comparison, the tiny Neutrino outrunner by Steve Neu of Neumotors weighs 14 grams and puts out 125 watts, peak. That would add up to 784 grams at 7 horsepower if that motor were scaled up to match the output of the LaunchPoint unit. The LaunchPoint motor is not only lightweight, but surprisingly small, scaling only six inches in diameter and one inch in thickness. It is composed of a great deal of carbon fiber in its plate-like structure. Behind this astonishing power output is the use of a Halbach array, “an arrangement of permanent magnets that augments the magnetic field on one side of the array while cancelling the field to near zero on the other side,” according to Wikipedia. The effect of the array is powerful enough to permit its use …