3 ms·

You can't scale up solar power to an aircraft carrying significant passengers / cargo.

• lucb1e 9y ago
  Do you have anymore information on that, a link perhaps?
  • kurthr 9y ago
    The weight for the mass of the passengers scales with the volume (m^3) while the area of the solar cells (and wing) to lift them scales with m^2. The typical solution for human scale aircraft is to fly faster (higher stall speed) and extend the length of the fuselage. Unfortunately, that combination doesn't increase efficiency so you end up needing even more fuel (or area and weight for batteries and PV). The demonstrated PV aircraft are already pushing the lowest wieght, lowest drag wings with the highest efficiency PV and energy dense Batteries. This is a case where bigger is harder (not so with Zeppelins where structural material weight/stiffness scale to much larger sizes).
• dreamcompiler 9y ago
  You can't do it with cars, either. Solar-powered cars are definitely a thing [1], but they're purely research vehicles. At 20% efficiency, PV cells will never power a practical car any consumer would want to buy. Nor would such cars likely be road-worthy on normal highways. The engineering and physics challenges are even tougher for passenger aircraft. It ain't gonna happen. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunraycer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunraycer