Using Ford F-150 Lightnings to Charge a Pipistrel Alpha Electro

Dean Sigler Announcements, Batteries, Electric Powerplants, Solar Power, Sustainable Aviation Leave a Comment

Using Ford F-150 Lightning pickups to charge a Pipistrel Alpha Electro will enable spectators at the Lafayette College-Lehigh football game to see an electric airplane flyover.  Remy Oktay wants to perform at his school’s football game, and needs to fly the craft from Hartford, Connecticut to the game in Easton, Pennsylvania. Bringing Your Own Charging Stations Recent attempts to fly reasonably long distances with electric airplanes have shown a few limitations.  Aside from the self-recharging craft like Solar Impulse or the Raymonds’ Solar-Flight Duo, planes with rechargeable batteries cannot go far without needing a compatible charger. We reported on several of these distance flight, noting the accommodations each made to fly beyond their home fields. Gabriel DeVault made a California outing into a search for viable charging station.  Friend Bob Mackey flew a Maule along the route, carrying a charger to keep Gabriel’s eGull going. A Swiss team flew to the North Sea, with chase cars lugging their charging gear …

Piper Archer Trainers to Go Electric

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

CAE, a Canadian high-tech company, H55, Safran, and Piper Aircraft have announced a joint venture to make the popular Piper Archer® trainer electric.  With 28,000 Archers in service, a Supplemental Type Certificate (STC) would replace the current Lycoming IO-360 or Continental CD-155 Diesel engines with a Safran electric motor. The Players CAE CAE, started 75 years ago by a Canadian war hero, pledges itself to making the world a safer place.  “Our vision is to be the worldwide partner of choice in civil aviation, defense and security, and healthcare by revolutionizing our customers’ training and critical operations with digitally immersive solutions to elevate safety, efficiency and readiness.” The organization runs large flight training programs and designs and operates banks of flight simulators.  It plans on converting 60 percent of its Piper fleet worldwide to electric power. This is all part of a larger environmental and social program as reported in their Annual Activity and Corporate Social Responsibility Report.  “To further …

The Layered Look in 1000x Solar Cells

Dean Sigler Announcements, Solar Power, Sustainable Aviation Leave a Comment

We hear a lot about 10X batteries, but 1000X solar cells?  Layering up may be stylish and even practical in the fashion world, and in solar cells may be a chance to unite otherwise dissimilar materials with otherwise limited light-to-electric conversion capabilities.   That strategy produced solar cells with 1000x that.  That’s what researchers at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) found when they created crystalline layers of layers of barium titanate (a mixed oxide of barium and titanium), strontium titanate and calcium titanate which they alternately placed on top of one another. Researchers found high increases in responses from the layered oxides because of higher permittivity – electrons able to flow more freely. The team’s paper, “Strongly enhanced and tunable photovoltaic effect in ferroelectric-paraelectric superlattices,” appears in the June 2 issue of the journal Science Advances. A Titanate Sandwich Barium titanate (BaTiO3 or BTO) is a “common ferroelectric material” used to manufacture electronic components such as capacitors.  It is, “a popular …

Joseph Oldham Beams an American Record

Dean Sigler Announcements, Batteries, Electric Powerplants, Solar Power, Sustainable Aviation Leave a Comment

A new “record” for an electric aircraft flight probably won’t make the books, but was a great sales opportunity for the off-grid charging system that accompanied it. 21 electric airplane records exist in the list of Federation Aeronautique Internationale-recognized achievements.  At least one was set in 2012 by Jean-Luc Soullier in his Colomban MC-30 Luciole (Firefly) – 189.87 kilometers per hour (117.98 mph) over a 15 kilometer closed course using a Lynch-type brushed motor.  It topped his record in February of the same year of 136.4 kph (84.76 mph). For a while, Soullier held records for altitude and distance, but these were eclipsed by others.  At the time, your editor encouraged beating these records, since they were early efforts in a field that should have shown greater progress that it has.  Batteries are not that much improved in some respects. Recent flights in Australia, Europe, and America required a mobile infrastructure to charge those batteries.  Cars, trucks and airplanes carried …

Harbor Air’s eBeaver, MagniX’s Motor, H55’s Batteries

Dean Sigler Announcements, Batteries, Electric Powerplants, Sky Taxis, Sustainable Aviation Leave a Comment

In our last blog entry, we discussed a three-partner enterprise with an American airframe propelled by a French motor powered by British batteries.  In this round, we have a Canadian airframe powered by an Australian/American motor driven by Swiss batteries.  These international collaborations may pay off in big ways. Datelined Vancouver, B.C., Everett, WA, and Sion, Switzerland, the joint press release shows a strong and well-organized partnership in action.  “Harbour Air, North America’s largest seaplane airline; magniX the company powering the electric aviation revolution; and H55, the spin off from Solar Impulse, producing highly efficient certified battery packs, announced a partnership to certify the world’s first electric Beaver (eBeaver) commuter airplane through a supplemental type certificate (STC) program.”  H55 is a part, also, of the Solar Impulse Foundation, organized to promote “1000+ efficient and profitable solutions to protect the environment.”  Their collaboration with Harbour Air and magniX is one of those solutions. Even though a small airline (40 aircraft) flying …

Black-silicon Cell Efficiency above 130 Percent

Dean Sigler Announcements, Solar Power, Sustainable Aviation Leave a Comment

Aalto University in Espoo, Finland has announced a seemingly impossible breakthrough – black-silicon solar cells that exceed 100-percent efficiency.  This breaks the Shockley-Queisser limit, previously thought to be an unbreakable barrier to any solar cell generating more than 33.7-percent efficiency for a single p-n junction photovoltaic cell.  The 1,000 Watts of sunlight falling on a square meter of single-junction solar cells could never produce more than 337 Watts to a battery or other receiving mechanism.  William Shockley, a co-winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics for his co-creation of the transistor and Hans-Joachim Queisser defined this limit at Shockley Semiconductor in 1961. In a traditional solid-state semiconductor such as silicon, a solar cell is made from two doped crystals.  One is an n-type semiconductor, which has extra free electrons, and the other a p-type semiconductor, which is lacking free electrons, referred to as “holes.” When initially placed in contact with each other, some of the electrons in the n-type portion will flow into the p-type to “fill in” the missing …

Switzerland to the North Sea – Flying Electrically

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

We’re still early in attempts to set world records with electric airplanes.  Jean-Luc Soullier, a friend of the blog, held many of them a decade ago, flying a little Colomban MC-30, an ultralight designed by one of Concorde’s engineers.  At the other end of the size scale, Solar Impulse set many records on its globe-girdling treks.  Now, a five-member mostly German team hopes to set seven world records “in one fell swoop” as they electrically traverse 700 kilometers (435 miles) between the Schanis, Switzerland airport and Norderney Airport on Germany’s North Sea. Friends of Electric Mobility The five have interesting professional lives beyond their love of flight.  “Futurologist Morell Westermann, Swiss pilot Marco Buholzer, the Norderneyer brewer Tobi Pape, the video and music producer Tom Albrecht and the podcaster Malik Aziz, who founded the association ‘Friends of Electric Mobility’ want to start on August 31,” according to Electric-Flight.eu.  They will fly Pipistrel’s recently certified Velis Electro.  The team adds, “Above …

SolarStratos Returns to Service

Dean Sigler Announcements, Batteries, Electric Powerplants, Solar Power, Sustainable Aviation Leave a Comment

SolarStratos, a mission envisioned by Raphaël  Domjan and an airplane designed by Calin Gologan,  returns to the skies after suffering a literal break in its program in 2018. During a series of tests that put increasingly heavy loads on the wings, its left wing broke with what was called a “technical damage.”  This type of breakage during stress testing is not uncommon, especially on what are special machines such as SolarStratos and Solar Impulse.  Solar Impulse 2 suffered a similar break when its newly-designed wing was being tested.  As noted, this type of setback takes the team back to the drawing board, but also besets them with new reflections on their ongoing decisions.  If it were easy, everyone would be doing it. “This pioneering spirit involves a real technological challenge, and takes us to unknown territories. Risks are an integral part of such a project, even if our objective is to anticipate them as well as possible; this is why …

Austrians, Swiss, Chinese Launch Three New Electric Aircraft

Dean Sigler Batteries, Electric Powerplants, Fuel Cells, Solar Power, Sustainable Aviation Leave a Comment

Three companies with divergent backgrounds launched three new electric aircraft in the last few months. 1973, and Its Descendants are Still Electric As noted in the blurb for its historic YouTube video for its first electric flight 46 years ago, “HB Flugtechnik is the pioneer in electric flight. The world’s first electric powered flight took place on October 21st, 1973 in Austria. 50 years later this company is still in business and doing better than ever. Given, that we talk about the aviation business, this is an outstanding and remarkable achievement. Today, HB Flugtechnik located at the now newly refurbished airfield Hofkirchen LOLH is not only the major MRO (Maintenance, Repair Organization or Maintenance, Repair, and Overhaul) for aircraft in Austria, it is still working on the new frontier of electric flight.” In a 2012 presentation at the AVT-209 Workshop in Lisbon, Portugal in 2012, Dr. Martin Hepperle of the DLR Institute of Aerodynamics and Flow Technology in Braunschweig, Germany …

Look What Fred To Started!

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

forty years ago today, Fred To’s Solar One flew the length of the runway at Lasham Airfield in Hampshire, England, solely on the energy derived from the weak winter illumination and stored in a small set of ni-cad batteries.. With his partner David Williams, he had built the wooden, model-aircraft-like structure in a farm building, visited by the farm’s horses and pigs. The airplane went on to be displayed at various airshows, and Fred went on to build an inflatable 100-foot-span flying wing that was the first to use “fly-by-wire” technology.  His inventiveness and design skills have informed many projects, as we reported in our November 2018 report on the award ceremony Fred recently attended. In short form, much has happened since then.  Larry Mauro flew his Solar Riser ultralight at Flabob Airport, California on April 29, 1979.  Much like Fred, who had limited funds, Larry could could install only 350 Watts of solar panels on his wing, a limitation …