Electric powered Dash 8 is coming

[boeingboy]

Pretty impressive that this technology is coming along this quickly. Still not practical - but to even see it happen is mind boggling.

https://copanational.org/en/2020/09/30/ ... e-horizon/

[valleyboy]

seems to me the article is more about hydrogen and not electric -

[lownslow]

A decade ago it was blimps. Colour me skeptical.

[DirtyDashDriver]

It'll still land like a shopping cart...

[Ash Ketchum]

The issue is making hydrogen efficiently. Currently it takes a lot of energy to make hydrogen which kind of defeats the purpose of the environmental savings.

[Inverted2]

And if it’s full of hydrogen it goes kaboom in an accident. Note my avatar.

[PilotDAR]

And if it’s full of hydrogen it goes kaboom in an accident.

Yeah, but they're not using it as a lifting gas, so it's okay....

541.7 Lifting Gas

Hydrogen is not an acceptable lifting gas for use in airships.

[Inverted2]

Would it not be in compressed tanks then or in liquid form? I have no idea how this would all work.

[itguy]

Yeah hydrogen isn't a very dense gas, so if you want any kind of usable amount you either need to compress it to a very high degree, or liquify it, which requires some serious cooling. There are technical problems either way.

[digits_]

It will probably have just enough endurance to get airborne and do a barrel roll

Cool project through!

[rookiepilot]

The world...is changing.

[boeingboy]

Geez...tough crowd.

If you had told me 5 years ago that an electric motor capable of flying a dash 8 was possible - I'd have said you were on crack. 3 years ago if you told me one would fly a Beaver - I would have said the same thing.

As far a Hydrogen is concerned, I have no idea the requirements for it but MTU now also is looking to replace turboprops with electric motors and powered by hydrogen. They even say that converting current gas turbine engines to run on Hydrogen could be done fairly easily.

https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news ... e=hs_email


Airbus is also working on Hydrogen power. Whether this is commercially viable or not - the technology is eye opening.

[valleyboy]

The only hurdle to over come is the batteries. The engine is now possible but as in EV's the battery tech has not caught up to a point being able to power the aircraft for enough endurance. Little dry but interesting snap shot into the issues with batteries of today and what's to come.

[780Pilot]

The other issue with battery's I imagine would be the weight. A full and empty battery weighs the same. Hydrogen is probably the future. Once they can figure out to make it economically viable as others here pointed out.

[itguy]

I think electric vehicles of all kinds are the way of the future. I'd love to see electric aircraft become the norm at some point! That would be an amazing future and I hope I live long enough to see it. I don't know if hydrogen is necessarily the way to go though, but I suppose it might be a good intermediate step towards electrification depending on how it's done. We did go through (are still going through?) a similar phase with hybrid electric cars, so that might work here too.

Unfortunately you can't just pump hydrogen out of the ground, and producing it is a pretty energy-intensive process. Most hydrogen today is produced from natural gas, via a process that ought to send any environmentalist into a gibbering fit. Electrolysis is probably the best alternative for now and although it's pretty energy intensive too, at least it only requires (lots of) electricity. There's a ton of super interesting research going on in this area though, with some really intriguing ideas that might solve some of these issues in the future.

As I mentioned before, storage is a bit of a problem because of the density, or lack thereof, of hydrogen. In hydrogen powered cars, I believe they've been using tanks pressurized anywhere between 300 and 700 bar (10k psi!). I can't help but wonder how reliable that is over the long term but I suppose there haven't been any exploding hydrogen cars yet.

All of this is only a path to electrification if they're using the hydrogen to produce electricity to power the engines, using fuel cells or other tech similar to what's mentioned in the MTU article. Some applications are just looking to burn the hydrogen as a fuel (also mentioned in the MTU article), which is certainly a shorter path to hydrogen adoption (and cleaner to burn than traditional fuels), but doesn't really advance the progress of electrification.

[Mr. Lutsch]

Unfortunately you can't just pump hydrogen out of the ground, and producing it is a pretty energy-intensive process. Most hydrogen today is produced from natural gas, via a process that ought to send any environmentalist into a gibbering fit. Electrolysis is probably the best alternative for now and although it's pretty energy intensive too, at least it only requires (lots of) electricity.

The issue is making hydrogen efficiently. Currently it takes a lot of energy to make hydrogen which kind of defeats the purpose of the environmental savings.

Out of sight out of mind. Feel-good consumerism for everyone!

[digits_]

It's not the "out of sight" that is the advantage, it's that all/most the pollution happens at some centralized facility, which allows us to deal with it more efficiently.

[RedAndWhiteBaron]

And if it’s full of hydrogen it goes kaboom in an accident. Note my avatar.

And if it's full of A1 it doesn't?

[Big Pistons Forever]

I can just see the jobs adds now:

"500 hrs electric airplane PIC required"

[fish4life]

Compact fusion reactors are probably one of the only hopes unfortunately they are prohibitively expensive

[valleyboy]

fusion reactors

Ironically the new generation reactors are the solution to the hydro issue. Wind and solar are just not efficient enough and take up far too much real estate. The intrum step is barium reactors which are compact and very safe. Germany gets it and have gone extensively atomic for electricity and they are clean, safe and can produce power far cheaper than the so call green alternatives.

Fission will be the real game changer when they learn how to control that beast.

[fish4life]

fusion reactors

Ironically the new generation reactors are the solution to the hydro issue. Wind and solar are just not efficient enough and take up far too much real estate. The intrum step is barium reactors which are compact and very safe. Germany gets it and have gone extensively atomic for electricity and they are clean, safe and can produce power far cheaper than the so call green alternatives.

Fission will be the real game changer when they learn how to control that beast.

I think you have the 2 mixed up, current reactors are fission reactors (splitting of atoms) and the future is fusion reactors.

This is what I was thinking of as the way to power aircraft of the future electrically

https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/pr ... usion.html

[itguy]

As much as I wish that were the current state of the art when it comes to fusion, the truth is we haven't managed to build a fusion reactor that actually produces more energy than it consumes yet, but that's another thing I hope I'll live to see become reality. The best candidate on the horizon so far is the massive multinational ITER reactor project in France (which Canada opted out of participating in, I might add). That one weighs somewhere north of 23,000 tons.

Now I have been reading about compact fission reactors lately, but I suspect the steam turbines and associated machinery required to convert any fission reactor's output to electricity would be far too large and heavy for an aircraft.

My guess for now, is that it'll be batteries powering electric aircraft, or possibly some sort of fuel cell as an interim step.

[floatman]

https://www.zeroavia.com

ZeroAvia is already flying a hydrogen powered Malibu. It is a hydrogen fuel cell that powers the electric motor.

Oxidation of the compressed hydrogen takes place electrochemically during which time the hydrogen atoms react with oxygen atoms to form water; in the process electrons are released and flow through an external circuit as an electric current to the motor to drive the propeller.

If you run the electrolyser with renewable energy such as wind and solar, the process is carbon free.

[itguy]

https://www.zeroavia.com

Nice. Between fuel cells and straight battery implementations, I imagine these are what most of the electric aircraft attempts will look like for now, which is a similar pattern to the path taken for electric cars. Realistically, electric cars might still be in that early stage now if it weren't for Musk.

I notice from the ZeroAvia web site that they plan on using electrolysis to produce their hydrogen, using wind and solar. While that does help them claim that their process is renewable (with all the usual caveats about manufacturing), I'm not sure how scalable it's going to be. It's probably good enough for a test program like this one, but if they plan on pitching hydrogen as a serious contender, someone's going to have to come up with a far more efficient method that scales up to match the needs of the aviation industry.

Near-term, I'm hoping for a breakthrough in solid-state battery research which would greatly impact electric vehicles of all kinds.