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Why not, a jet powered plane can fly 17,300km, electric plane must have about 2x energy efficiency (70-80% vs 35-40% overall) because it's not a heat machine, s
by anovikov 10y ago
Why not, a jet powered plane can fly 17,300km, electric plane must have about 2x energy efficiency (70-80% vs 35-40% overall) because it's not a heat machine, so with 50x less energy density it translates to 700km. Actually it can be more because batteries are a lot denser than jet fuel so plane will be thinner, thus having a lot less air resistance, so 800km is possible. As you can see they are shooting for 500km, must be easily possible.
Airbus works on a 1000km battery powered regional plane (catch is, it's probably a turboprop) by 2030, by the way.
- kgabis 10y agoYou've contradicted yourself by saying that batteries are both less and more dense than jet fuel...
- anovikov 10y agoLOL energy density is much much lower, but volumetric density is several times higher. Meaning, they take less space for same weight -> airframe can have smaller profile and have less air resistance.
- kgabis 10y agoI don't think that's true, both volumetric and mass densities for lithium ion batteries are very low (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/Energy_density.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/Energy_d...).