2 ms·

Getting on plane requires a high peak power output Could a capacitor bank be used to deliver a burst of power to plane out? Or does the weight and volume of c

• chrisdalke 5y ago
  The power required to plane in a boat looks a bit like a normal curve -- Power consumption scales upwards exponentially with speed until you either 1) Get going fast enough to hydroplane and reach a high efficiency regime 2) Hit the peak power of the drivetrain and fail to accelerate further A capacitor bank wouldn't really help here, since that power has to come from somewhere. The issue isn't that the batteries aren't capable of outputting that peak power -- Even small battery systems are more than capable of outputting the 50kw+ it might take to get on plane. The real issue is that doing that repeatedly requires you to scale up your battery capacity and weight, which is a positive feedback loop. Boats are not just getting on/off plane once on a tank of gas, they're doing it 10-20 times depending on driving conditions, surroundings, no wake zones. This might happen 100s of times for watersports like wakeboarding. So a big part of the equation is finding a way to save weight elsewhere that can then be used to insert more batteries.