EV-6A: A Thought Experiment

[blaplante]

Originally Posted by Snowflake

Long duration of continuous power, yes, but not maximum. Who cruises at full throttle? If you do, there's at least one other way to be more efficient in the air...

Who does? I do.

I'm out west, and clearing the mountains to go anywhere significant means I'm at 10,000'. At 8000' DA I'm at 75% power. Now, since I'm in the SW, a standard temp day is rare. On my last long XC I was up at 12,500 (trying to stay above thermals), with a DA of 16,000.

Now, if I still lived in Minn, the situation would be different....

[Mike S]

Originally Posted by Snowflake

Who cruises at full throttle?

Folks with a C/S prop.

[airguy]

Originally Posted by Snowflake

Long duration of continuous power, yes, but not maximum. Who cruises at full throttle? If you do, there's at least one other way to be more efficient in the air...

From takeoff threshold until top of descent, nearly every flight for me.

I didn't build a fast plane to fly it slow.

Only reason to pull it back is heavy turbulence or trying to stretch range - and I installed additional fuel tankage so I don't have to stretch range.

[MGR1977]

Originally Posted by Skysailor

Electric vehicles produce carbon emissions but they do it remotely. Generating and transmitting the electricity to charge your electric vehicle is the reason. Solar and wind simply do no produce affordable power in sufficient quantities to be a viable source yet. Nuclear power generation can but with another set of issues.

Yeah, so I have to disagree with you on this one. This is simply not true. I grew up on a farm where all of our power was generated by wind. And later by solar as well. In the 70's and 80's. This was for powering anything from the lights, to the drill, to the welder etc. Of course there was a battery bank and inverter too. But the principle remains.

What you're saying is actually just some company that wants to put a spin onto something because they have some commercial reason to do so. Nowadays there are entire countries that, for some days of the year, run their entire grid off of solar or wind. Oh and solar and wind are cheaper than just about anything else out there even taking capital expenditure into account. Of course you have to have some sort of storage bank in the grid to store excess capacity (when there's too much wind) and release it again when there's too little. Goes without saying. If you have an interconnected, efficient national grid (like any modern nation should have), this is easily and economically achieved through hydro electrical storage dams.

[MGR1977]

Originally Posted by Captain Avgas

There are numerous new battery technologies in the pipeline that offer higher energy density than the current generation Li-ion. But they just don’t tick all the other boxes.

Maybe not with traditional batteries that we generally think about but have you heard of fuel cells...? Both hydrogen fuel and methanol fuel cells... The methanol fuels cell especially is an interesting development. Very high energy density, you fill it up like a normal gas tank, it converts the methanol straight into electricity, a little bit of CO2 emissions but nothing major, no issues with "battery life", Intrinsically safe (well at least as safe as flying around with Avgas in your tanks), and widely available. Couple this with an electric motor with only 4 moving parts, with an energy conversion efficiency of 97% vs. a Lycoming's 30% and it makes for an interesting solution. The technology hasn't been scaled yet, but watch this space.

[Mike S]

Originally Posted by MGR1977

you fill it up like a normal gas tank, it converts the methanol straight into electricity,

Isnt methanol corrosive to alum?

What capacity is there to manufacture it, what is the capacity to distribute it.

Storage issues?

[David Z]

Originally Posted by MGR1977

Yeah, so I have to disagree with you on this one. This is simply not true. I grew up on a farm where all of our power was generated by wind. And later by solar as well. In the 70's and 80's. This was for powering anything from the lights, to the drill, to the welder etc. Of course there was a battery bank and inverter too. But the principle remains.

What you're saying is actually just some company that wants to put a spin onto something because they have some commercial reason to do so. Nowadays there are entire countries that, for some days of the year, run their entire grid off of solar or wind. Oh and solar and wind are cheaper than just about anything else out there even taking capital expenditure into account. Of course you have to have some sort of storage bank in the grid to store excess capacity (when there's too much wind) and release it again when there's too little. Goes without saying. If you have an interconnected, efficient national grid (like any modern nation should have), this is easily and economically achieved through hydro electrical storage dams.

A significant portion of the electricity of Canada and US Eastern seaboard comes from hydroelectric dams. A good chunk of it is nuclear too.

[airguy]

Originally Posted by Mike S

Isnt methanol corrosive to alum?

The chemical methanol itself - no.

The method used to produce it, where the product is acidic, yes. That's what started the old wives tales about ethanol being corrosive to aluminum decades ago. It's not - when pure - but the old (no longer used) production methods frequently turned out an acidic product, which WAS corrosive to aluminum. Same applies here to methanol.

[Captain Avgas]

Originally Posted by MGR1977

Maybe not with traditional batteries that we generally think about but have you heard of fuel cells...? Both hydrogen fuel and methanol fuel cells... The methanol fuels cell especially is an interesting development. Very high energy density, you fill it up like a normal gas tank, it converts the methanol straight into electricity, a little bit of CO2 emissions but nothing major, no issues with "battery life", Intrinsically safe (well at least as safe as flying around with Avgas in your tanks), and widely available. Couple this with an electric motor with only 4 moving parts, with an energy conversion efficiency of 97% vs. a Lycoming's 30% and it makes for an interesting solution. The technology hasn't been scaled yet, but watch this space.

Fuel cells are in fact a very old technology. The first hydrogen fuel cells to be used commercially were in the 1960s during the NASA Gemini program. Methanol fuel cells date back to the 1990s. Both technologies have intrinsic limitations which have proven difficult to overcome despite huge amounts of research over a long period of time. In the year 2012 alone the US granted almost 1000 patents on fuel cell developments. Don’t hold your breath waiting for the big breakthrough on fuel cells.

[MGR1977]

Originally Posted by Captain Avgas

Fuel cells are in fact a very old technology. The first hydrogen fuel cells to be used commercially were in the 1960s during the NASA Gemini program. Methanol fuel cells date back to the 1990s. Both technologies have intrinsic limitations which have proven difficult to overcome despite huge amounts of research over a long period of time. In the year 2012 alone the US granted almost 1000 patents on fuel cell developments. Don’t hold your breath waiting for the big breakthrough on fuel cells.

Here you go - https://www.carscoops.com/2020/03/53...-costs-455000/ An electric German sports car with a range of 820kms on a full 65 liter Methanol tank. I'm not saying that this can be implemented exactly like it is into a light plane and I'm also not saying that it will happen in the next 5 years, but it does show proof of concept.