Manfred Ruhmer has designed a motorized trike for the Laminar wing under which he has flown to world champion status three times, and achieved a world record flight of 701 kilometers (434.62 miles). The trike can be powered with a Simonini two-stroke or Bailey four-stroke engine, or the Geiger/Eck electric motor/controller/folding propeller combination.
Here, Manfred shows off some of his world-class flying skills. Note that about 48 seconds into the video, the landing gear has picked up some vegetation. Later, at around the 2:00 mark, the streamers reappear. Whether this is from the grassy field from which Manfred flies, or some very low passes, is open to speculation.
The Icaro 2000 site is useful for making some important comparisons between the IC engine options and the electric flyer.
Each of the two engines’ installed weights is 18.3 kilograms (40.26 pounds), and the fuel tank for either holds 8 liters of fuel. Icaro claims both engines consume about 2 to 2.5 liters per hour, giving up to four hours endurance on the small tank.
The HP10 electric motor weighs only 5 kilograms (11 pounds) to the basic airframe, and the smallest, 24 Amp-hour battery pack adds 12.5 kilograms (27.5 pounds), slightly lighter than either gasoline-powered engine and fuel. If one is content with 20 minutes power duration, and willing to rely on thermals to remain aloft, this is a viable electric alternative.
More endurance requires bigger battery packs, with the 40 Amp-hour pack adding 16 kilograms (39.2 pounds) and the 60 Amp-hour pack 22 kilograms (48.4 pounds). Endurance goes to 3o minutes and 40 minutes, respectively.
The Simonini puts out 80 kilograms (176 pounds) of thrust, while the Bailey and HP-10 each produce 60 kilograms (132 pounds).
Pricing, depending on battery pack, runs from 8,300 Euros ($11,255) to 10,800 euros ($14,645). The Simonini tw0-stroke version is 6,500 Euros ($8,873) and the Bailey four-stroke version sells for 7,500 Euros ($10,237). This seems like a relatively inexpensive way to fly a stable, highly entertaining electric vehicle.
This press release from the CAFE Foundation speaks for itself. The fourth symposium of its kind is an international, multidiscipline gathering which will influence the very future of aviation.
Santa Rosa, CA., Mar. 1, 2010 – The Comparative Aircraft Flight Efficiency (CAFE) Foundation’s 4th Annual Electric Aircraft Symposium (EAS IV) will convene a renowned faculty of experts on electric aircraft technologies on April 23-24, 2010, at the Doubletree Inn in Rohnert Park, California. The networking program will consist of presentations and exhibits on bio-fuel hybrids, advanced electric motors, solar panels, sailplane technology, fuel cells, future technology for batteries, battery safety during charging, propeller noise reduction, autonomous flight controls, drag reduction, vertical takeoff designs and NASA’s Green Flight Challenge competition. Each presentation will be followed by a Q&A session with the audience, which will be comprised of government officials, enthusiasts, designers, entrepreneurs, students and media. The debut of some exciting new designs is expected at this year’s meeting.
Among the outstanding faculty will be Dr. Jaephil Cho from Korea, presenting his pioneering work on the nano-honeycomb and nano-tube Lithium battery breakthroughs, Aerovironment’s Tyler MacCready on “Solar Wings” and NASA’s Jonathan Trent on the OMEGA ocean bio-fuel project. Other expert faculty includes speakers from NASA, Boeing, NREL, Stanford, UC Davis, CAFE and two teams from the Green Flight Challenge.
The Symposium is intentionally designed to advance Green Aviation and to provide attendees with an exclusive opportunity to gain the latest, most comprehensive and highest-level understanding available in the rapidly growing field of electric aircraft. The faculty will network with attendees during breaks, lunch and the evening’s Theme Dinners at which attendees are invited to present 4 minute talks.
The CAFE EAS was the first and remains the only electric aircraft symposium for engineers, venture capitalists, designers, aircraft manufacturers, energy policy makers and interested members of the general public. It anticipates the emergence of an enormous new marketplace for Green vehicle and energy technology companies.
The 2010 program will examine the growth projections for electric aircraft and explore their implications for rejuvenating and transforming aviation. Reliability, navigation, training and safety issues will also be addressed.
Attendees must register in advance for the limited seating in the Symposium’s Ballroom. Registration is available at this address.
Immediately following the Symposium, a special insider’s tour of select Sonoma County Wineries has been arranged.
The EAS IV is organized by the non-profit, all-volunteer CAFE Foundation, which has a 29 year history of supporting the advance of aircraft efficiency and technology. CAFE is also the host of the 2011 CAFE Green Flight Challenge, NASA’s $1.5M prize for 200 MPG aircraft.
Dr. Steve Morris is President of MLB Co., an enterprise specializing in low-cost, compact, remotely piloted and autonomous aerial surveillance, mapping and monitoring systems. On December 23, 2009, he and his associates test flew their first man-carrying, directly-piloted craft – an electric one.
Pilot Brian Porter made two flights totalling about 20 minutes in a part 103 ultralight Swift hang glider to which was attached a custom-built pilot/powerplant/landing gear module. Power was by a Randall Fisher-supplied ElectraFlyer motor coupled to a reduction system built by Dr. Morris and his associates at MLB.
Despite limitation imposed by the motor controller’s maximum current and propeller efficiency limited to 65-75 percent, the airplane demonstrated performance within 10 percent of calculations. Its rate of climb was 335 feet per minute, maximum level flight speed was 60 miles per hour, and it cruised on 4.6 kW. Duration, range, rate of climb, and lift:drag are expected to improve when a pilot fairing streamlines the very open cockpit on the current version.
Dr. Morris will present his paper on these early experiments at the CAFE Foundation’s Fourth Annual Electric Aircraft Symposium – all the more reason to attend.
Pierre-Jean Beney may be the first to fly an electrically-powered paraglider with a tricycle wheeled chassis.
Using a Trikebuggy, itself a unique platform, Beney mounted two Hacker A200-8 motors with 220 Amp controllers, a tidy reduction system, and his own microprocessor board to drive the motors with a combined throttle and kill switch. The board, according to Beney, also monitors the LiF2PO4 batteries, RPM, and will soon be connected to a global positioning system (GPS) to measure speed, “and eventually make coffee!!!” Other anticipated changes may include different motors, including a larger, direct drive type.
The motors are each capable of producing 15 kW and can handle 185 Amps of current continuously, with 300 Amps peak.
Beney provided your editor with a brief tutorial on the difference between powered paragliders (PPG) and powered parachutes (PPC). “This is not a powered parachute, it is a powered paraglider (you can tell by the shape of the wing which is very rounded compared to more flat for PPC). Within PPG, there [are] some people like me who like wheel and have a trike.”
We look forward to detailed pictures and specifications from Pierre-Jean, who flies in the Jean Lake area near Las Vegas, Nevada.
This dictum from Paul MacCready that we can do a great deal more with far less material expenditure is well realized in a big way by researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) with their new type of solar cell. Using about two percent of the silicon semiconductor material normally required for crystalline cells, and achieving a high level of energy conversion, the new cells may also be relatively inexpensive to manufacture.
Silicon wire array
As noted by Harry Atwater in Caltech’s press release, “These solar cells have, for the first time, surpassed the conventional light-trapping limit for absorbing materials…” Atwater is Howard Hughes Professor, professor of applied physics and materials science, and director of Caltech’s Resnick Institute, which according to the press release, “focuses on sustainability research.” Arranged like rug fibers in a vertically-oriented array, the individual silicon wire solar cells comprise a small portion of the total horizontal area of the cell, the rest being an inexpensive polymer substrate. Atwater and his fellow researchers claim that the individual “wires” are capable of absorbing 85 to 100 percent of the solar energy shining upon them. So why did the researchers fill only two-percent of the space available with this highly-efficient material?
Schematic of sillicon wire array
“‘When we first considered silicon wire-array solar cells, we assumed that sunlight would be wasted on the space between wires,’ explains [Michael] Kelzenberg (one of the researchers). ‘So our initial plan was to grow the wires as close together as possible. But when we started quantifying their absorption, we realized that more light could be absorbed than predicted by the wire-packing fraction alone. By developing light-trapping techniques for relatively sparse wire arrays, not only did we achieve suitable absorption, we also demonstrated effective optical concentration—an exciting prospect for further enhancing the efficiency of silicon-wire-array solar cells.’”
The small amount of expensive silicon involved lowers the overall materials cost of this cell, and, “The composite nature of these solar cells, Atwater adds, means that they are also flexible. ‘Having these be complete flexible sheets of material ends up being important,’ he says, ‘because flexible thin films can be manufactured in a roll-to-roll process, an inherently lower-cost process than one that involves brittle wafers, like those used to make conventional solar cells.’”
There are drawbacks. Cell size, so far, is very small – just square centimeters. Development needs to take place to create larger, more commercially viable sizes, much like the mass production processes employed by Nanosolar (See “Big Nano, January 10, 2010.)
Details of the project were reported in the journal Nature Materials.
Critics of biofuels often cite the contrary use of foodstocks for producing ethanol, for instance, as a process that will lead to food shortages, and consequently higher prices for fuel and food. One researcher and his graduate students are investigating a way to convert waste such as orange peels and old newspapers, and social and health irritants such as tobacco plants, and turn them into a cheap, clean fuel.
Dr. Henry Daniell is head of the Biotechnology Graduate Program forthe Burnett School of Biomedical Sciences at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, Florida. His primary fields of research include developing low-cost methods of delivering pharmaceuticals to patients in need and even vaccines to combat terrorist bioweapons. Involvement with plant-based cures probably helped lead him to this discovery, which the college describes as a possible “breakthrough of a lifetime.”
Daniell’s goal is to “relegate gasoline to a secondary fuel,” with a process that uses “plant-derived enzyme cocktails” to break down biomass into sugar, and then ferment that into ethanol. The argument that the critic’s favorite vegetable, corn starch, requires more energy to create than it in turn produces as ethanol goes by the wayside, since the materials used in Daniell’s are abundant, not foodstuffs, and would otherwise require vast amounts of energy for their disposal, or cause lung cancer in their normal use.
Waste and problematic plants certainly exist in abundance. Discarded orange peels in Florida alone, for instance, could create about 200 million gallons of ethanol a year. Tobacco produces 40 metric tons of biomass annually in each acre of plants. Using cloned genes from wood-rotting fungi or bacteria, Daniell’s team produced enzymes in tobacco plants. Daniell claims that this natural process, rather than manufacturing synthetic versions of these enzymes, could dramatically reduce the cost of making tobacco into fuel.
The process might raise the price of tobacco for cigarettes, though, which could lead to reduced numbers of smokers. In an inverse to the corn as food and fuel controversy, this might be a win-win scenario for everyone concerned.
In his presentation at AirVenture 2009, George Bye, CEO of Bye Energy, set forth some ambitious goals for his company. This included the development of a hybrid electric power system for light aircraft (under 250 horsepower) with target markets for general aviation and experimental homebuilt aircraft. Bye explained that light, powerful electric motors and Lithium-ion batteries have achieved a mature technology level that makes this an ideal time to enter this new market. On February 18, Bye introduced the proof of concept systems that will enable him to achieve this.
Charles B. Johnson (left) and George Bye, COO and CEO of Bye Energy with POC airplane
The Green Flight Project consists, in its first phase, of an electric motor based on the UQM 125, a 90-pound, 95-percent efficient unit that puts out up to 168 horsepower (output of the initial POC motor will be closer to 100 horsepower). A set of battery packs, totalling 200- to 300-pounds will provide power, and a dedicated motor controller and battery management system (BMS) will keep things cool and under control. The system, approximating the weight of current internal combustion engine and fuel systems, will be installed in a mainstream two-seater, with potential for development in Light Sport Aircraft (LSA), FAR Part 23 (what we think of a “light” aircraft), and experimentals. Bye hopes that work with UQM will lower the motor weight to 65 to 70 pounds, a first step in refining the proof of concept. Later, the system will be augmented by an yet undefined hybrid component, and by solar films from Ascent Solar, which Bye claims could support up to 20-percent of a typical light airplane’s energy needs.
Improved cowling (blue) compared to original, IC engine cowling
less frontal area, and lack of cooling drag improve performance
Bye notes that the average age of the 200,000 general aviation fleet is 33 years, with the highest point of light aircraft production coinciding with this figure – 14,000 units in 1977. Bye feels that this helps to explain the dropoff in interest in flying among young people. Imagine a 17-year old who’s accustomed to state-of-the art electronics, and who owns a full contingent of video games, iPhones, laptops, notebooks, etc. Take him for an introductory flight and immerse him in a noisy, fume-spouting mechanical museum piece. Light aircraft simply have not kept up with the constantly emerging areas of electronics, or even the impressive gains in automotive technology.
Bye projects a market of up to 950 of his systems mounted on new or retrofitted general aviation aircraft between 2010 and 2015, with a further 3,325 systems between 2015 and 2020, if he can meet market share goals. He foresees sales of 350 systems for new and retrofitted experimental aircraft during the first half of this decade, rising to 825 in the latter half. “Retrofit” is an important word here, because the system is meant to be adaptable enough for a wide variety of existing aircraft, with little change in weight and balance characteristics overall. Technology also plays a part, with battery and motor improvements about to go from a fairly linear progress curve to an exponential development surge. Things will get lighter, more reliable, more powerful, and less expensive over time, emulating trends in the electronics industry. Charles B. Johnson, Chief Operations Officer for the firm, affirms this new direction. “The time to accelerate incorporation of this new hybrid technology has arrived. General Aviation is a vital market that will benefit from the environmentally friendly, lower cost, more efficient and higher performing aircraft.”
The current state of general aviation may seem a hindrance for its immediate salvation, but Bye sees this as an opportunity for entrepreneurs like him. “We are hoping to invigorate and revitalize the industry. This proof of concept is a first step in that challenge.”
Imagine a high-energy system that could be dropped in your car for $1,600, give it a 30-percent boost in mileage (and a simultaneous reduction in its carbon footprint), and added pep off the line. Imagine that this was developed by two of the leaders in Formula 1 racecar development. You might be interested.
Ricardo, a long-time developer of racing engine refinements, and Williams, oft-time winning chassis builder, are collaborating on just such a setup.
Kinetic Energy Recovery Systems (KERS), developed originally for the 2009 Formula 1 racing season, used flywheels, batteries, and stunningly powerful electric motors (60 kW – 81 horsepower from four to eight kilogram cylinders) to augment the internal-combustion engines motivating the racers. The systems were controversial and eventually scrapped by all racers. Teething problems in the first year of racing led to the barring of KERS in the 2010 season.
Porsche GTR3 showing hybrid components. Illustration by Williams Hybrid Power.
Applying these components to a roadable supercar, Porsche is introducing its GTR3 Hybrid at the upcoming Geneva Motor Show, and its technology looks a great deal like that from the 2009 F1 season. A Williams flywheel takes energy from braking, and spins up to provide power to the two 60 horsepower motors that power the front wheels. This, assisting the 480 horsepower internal combustion engine, should provide a level of acceleration that will shock even Porsche owners. Expect this car to be a bit high end, since the “regular” GTR3 costs over $400,000, and has a waiting list if you’re anxious to join that club.
From that vaunted height, a more mundane prospect for retrofitting a milder form of the system to the family car may seem like a big step down, especially in price. But Ricardo, Willliams, and several partners are working toward that goal. There may even be an application possible in our aerial devices.
Ricardo group technology director Neville Jackson explains, “Kinergy offers the prospect of enabling effective hybridization extending into market sectors where the use of conventional electro-chemical battery systems technology would be prohibitively expensive.” Might we see variants of these systems in scooters, motorcycles, and may we dream – airplanes?
(Editor’s note: Many thanks to David Bettencourt, an attorney in Hawaii, attendee at last year’s Electric Aircraft Symposium and we hope at EAS IV – for making me aware of the possibilities of hybrid electric aircraft and explaining their operation.)
Registration for the Fourth Annual Electric Aircraft Symposium (EAS IV) is now open. Intense interest in this year’s excellent program, with experts from around the world providing the latest in design, technology, and real-world examples of electric flight, has produced an added benefit for this year’s attendees.
Formal presentations are only one means of exploring a wealth of information at this year’s Symposium. The CAFE Foundation, hard-pressed to include all presenters, has scheduled Theme Dinners – an opportunity to hear short, thought-provoking presentations and enjoy lively discussions with the faculty, all accompanied by the great food and fine wines for which the Sonoma Valley is renowned.
This expanded program has already drawn an overflow of presenters. We anticipate a similar high level of interest from attendees – and therefore urge you to register now to ensure your place at the Symposium.
Early registration for the day-and-a-half of presentations is $299, with special rates for students and media representatives. The Foundation has arranged special room rates for attendees with the Doubletree Hotel Sonoma Wine Country , which is hosting the gathering.
Imperial College London and its partners, including Volvo, have announced a £3.4 million (about $5.44 million) project to develop a new energy storage material that could act as a structural material in cars. The lightweight, carbon-fiber-based material could replace traditional materials in the car’s structure while storing electrical energy. This dual-purpose material could save the weight of separate batteries, increase the strength of the car’s structure, and improve overall vehicle performance.
Dr. Emile Greenhalgh, of the College’s Aeronatical Department, and coordinator of the project, sees other opportunities for this material.
“We are really excited about the potential of this new technology. We think the car of the future could be drawing power from its roof, its bonnet (editor’s note: hood, to you Yanks.) or even the door, thanks to our new composite material. Even the Sat Nav could be powered by its own casing. The future applications for this material don’t stop there – you might have a mobile phone that is as thin as a credit card because it no longer needs a bulky battery, or a laptop that can draw energy from its casing so it can run for a longer time without recharging. We’re at the first stage of this project and there is a long way to go, but we think our composite material shows real promise.”
Here, Dr. Greenhalgh demonstrates the material’s ability to capture, store and release energy.
In our entry for October 16, 2009, “Buckminster Fuller Would be Proud,” we speculated about the possible use of graphenes as simultaneous structural and energy storage systems.
Dr. Greenhalgh and his associates seem to be demonstating that concept, even as they work to improve the strength and energy density of their invention.
