11 ms·
2MW Electric Aircraft Engine
- Causality1 5y agoThe way specifications are given makes it very hard to compare this to fossil fuel engines.
- willis936 5y agoIt's an impressive piece of mechanical engineering. I don't see it as being able to fly without some really aggressive advances in technology. If we stay on our current track then maybe in 200 years we could have a direct conversion compact fusion reactor as the power source of a high-power electric plane. Until then I don't think this could reasonably fly.
- Tuna-Fish 5y ago... and what exactly are you basing any of this on? Battery-powered airplanes are perfectly capable of flight. They are just inefficient for long trips.
- willis936 5y agoNone of them have 20 MW to feed.
- Robotbeat 5y agoThe largest machines humanity has built (typically mining machines) are electric. I don’t see why people think total power is the real limiting factor vs, say, specific power.
- osigurdson 5y agoAt the upper end, the largest aircraft engines such as the GE CF6 (used in 747) produce about 40MW [1] and there are 4 of these. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Electric_LM6000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Electric_LM6000
- willis936 5y agoThe GE CF6 does not use motors for propulsion. The LM6000 is not used in aircraft because it can't be with current technology.
- osigurdson 5y agoThe CF6 is a gas turbine engine, not an aircraft. Virtually all aircraft engines outside of very small personal planes are gas turbines. This includes turboprops, helicopter applications, all commercial aircraft (turbofan) as well as fighter jets. The primary difference is how the thrust is used. If mechanical energy is required a power turbine is used - as is done in the LM6000. The LM6000 is the industrial version of the CF6 (the cold section is largely the same). The thrust is converted to mechanical energy using a power turbine. I included this link instead of the CF6 since it provides a direct reference to power output in MW (i.e. not thrust).
- onion2k 5y ago200 years is a little less than twice as long humans have been flying powered aircraft for. It's more than 3 times longer than humans have been putting things in to space for. The idea that you can predict that far in to the future is just silly.
- Reason077 5y agoOf course it will be able to fly. With 20MW of engine power at your disposal you’ll be able to lift an awful lot of batteries. The real question is, how long and how far will it be able to fly? And how much payload?
- bserge 5y agoWhere's the 20MW from?
- willis936 5y agoThe 5th and final line: >Wright will use 10 2MW motors on its Wright 1 aircraft - that's a total of 20 MW, which is as powerful as an A320 Airbus aircraft The blog also links to a "deep dive" with a few more details. https://medium.com/@jeff_60994/wright-has-begun-testing-our-2-mw-aviation-grade-motor-for-transport-category-zero-emissions-79cb01c2cfc6 https://medium.com/@jeff_60994/wright-has-begun-testing-our-...
- Reason077 5y ago> ”Where's the 20MW from?” Quite a few tonnes of batteries, I’d say. But potentially there are other options like fuel cell stacks.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y agovs. quite a few tonnes of jet fuel.
- cee_el123 5y agoShould it be so easy for anyone to market their products with the Wright name ?
- kibwen 5y agoWe could say the same about Tesla.
- matthewmcg 5y agoThe Wright brothers’ company is still around, albeit as a successor entity through many mergers and reorganizations. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtiss-Wright https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtiss-Wright
- quanto 5y agoThe web page claims that the electric motor can output 2000 kW at 10 kW/kg. For comparison, Europrop TP400, a modern turboprop engine, has 8200 kW 1938 kg (= 4.1 kW/kg) So, although the electric motor is smaller by a factor of 4, its power density is about 2.5 times higher. The web page claims that the motor design is scalable up to 4000 kW, which is great. The fastest turboprop airplane was TU-114, a Soviet airliner in the 50's that flew almost as fast as modern jet airliners. TU-114 uses four engines (Kuznetsov NK-12) that are the most powerful turboprop engines ever in production (11000 kW at 2900 kg). We need more powerful electric motors to emulate this performance..
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago> although the electric motor is smaller by a factor of 4, its power density is about 2.5 times higher Is there any standard way of calculating this with the battery / full tank?
- sokoloff 5y agoI think it’s most appropriate to compare vs “tanked for a given/defined range (including reserves)” rather than fully tanked. Airliners are rarely flown with full tanks, because that’s rarely needed. (Tanks are often sized for maximum ferry missions rather than maximum cabin load missions.)
- mojomark 5y agoSee my comment to answer this question. Volumetric power density impacts are neglected in the OP's 'back of the napkin' estimate comparison. As you suspect, you need to account for the motor size and the specific application to see if this motor is a benefit to you. Complicating matters is the fact that the OEM does a poor job of presenting these metrics up front on the landing page.
- scoopertrooper 5y agoBig claims for sure, but it looks like they're tied in with ARPA-E and a major airline. So, it's not some backwoods mechanics making bold claims about their infinite energy machine that runs on their special brew of moonshine. https://mediacentre.easyjet.com/story/14628/easyjet-partner-wright-electric-selected-for-u-s-department-of-energy-electric-aircraft-programme https://mediacentre.easyjet.com/story/14628/easyjet-partner-...
- baybal2 5y ago> 800 mile range Screams of a scam
- JohnJamesRambo 5y agoI never really thought the engine the limiting factor in electric flight, but rather the heavy batteries. Found this somewhere, is it still up to date? > Jet fuel has an energy density of 9.6 kWh/L. What this means is that jet fuel, pound for pound, is nearly 50x more energy-dense than batteries. However, the inefficiency of internal combustion means that 1,000 pounds of jet fuel yields only about 14x more power than 1000 lbs of batteries.
- quanto 5y agoYes, the 15x factor (14x in your quote) is what is often cited in discussions, given all else equal. What complicates is that fossil fuels can drive propellers, turbofans, and jets, where as electric motors can only drive propellers -- each technology with its own efficiency envelop.
- Robotbeat 5y agoThat’s not true. You can drive a turbofan or jet with electric motors as well. For high bypass turbofans, a prop fan is functionally identical. For jets, the heat increase can be produced by multistage compression (although there’s little reason to do that versus a single stage turbofan/prop fan except for maybe supersonic, and even then single-stage makes a lot of sense).
- guntars 5y agoAlso there’s nothing that says a jet engine needs to use jet fuel. You could use electric heaters to heat the air, because ultimately it is a heat engine and it doesn’t care where the heat comes from. Surely, if you took an existing jet engine and put some electric heaters in it would be very inefficient, but if you played to the strengths of electric heat, you could potentially make something interesting. For example, there are no potentially corrosive combustion products and in fact you don't even need to have oxygen flowing through it - it might as well be CO2 (hello martian electric jets). The second benefit is that you can deliver electric heat into a closed system continuously without cooling it from fluid flow. It's more beneficial for furnaces and things, but maybe there's a design out there that can take advantage of it. Probably more relevant for some sort of closed cycle piston aircraft. You could reach higher internal temperatures as long as the materials can support it.
- bserge 5y agoThe inverter is more interesting here imo. Actually, that's only part of the problem. Delivering 2MW+ from batteries to the engine and other systems seems pretty hard. Delivering it without failure, even more so...
- Reason077 5y agoIt’s probably easier, fundamentally speaking, than delivering jet fuel to turbine engines without failure over a huge range of environmental conditions. It’s just that over many years we’ve perfected the later and already figured out and solved pretty much everything that can go wrong.
- cubano 5y agoSo at the end...they are saying that soon we might be seeing commercial airplanes with 10 props? How would that be configured do you think? Like 5 under each wing seems like a stretch...could you put maybe 3 under each wing and 2 on the back tail somehow? Or is 5 under each wing the only way to go?
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- phire 5y agoWell, the aircraft mockup on their website[1] has what looks like 4 ducted fans in the tail and 6 on each wing. Might be an older mockup from when they thought they would need 18 motors. Though, I suspect very little engineering thought has gone into that mockup. Looks more like something marketing threw together in an afternoon. [1] https://www.weflywright.com/wright-1 https://www.weflywright.com/wright-1
- audunw 5y agoWhy is 5 on each wings a stretch? With electric motors you have a lot more flexibility, and distributed propulsion has some significant benefits. Check out maxwell X-57 for research on this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_X-57_Maxwell https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_X-57_Maxwell Electric planes will probably look very different from modern turboprop/turbofan planes by the time they’re fully optimized for electric propulsion.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- salimmadjd 5y agoAnyone knows how much more efficiency is gained (due to reduced weight) once a jetliner consumes 50% of its fuel? Curious if for flying it’ll be more practical to use electricity for some kind of direct or indirect carbon sequestration (to be carbon neutral) fuel generation and continue to fly with some type of combustion based fuel.
- zhoujianfu 5y agoI know that stopping to refuel in the middle of a flight vs carrying all the fuel you need to go nonstop is about 20% more efficient because of not having to carry fuel to carry fuel.
- cmrdporcupine 5y agoCould electric planes not benefit from having the initial energy heavy and take-off process boosted through some external source? Some sort of tow/tug, some sort of push, or the use of a supercapacitor? This way battery need not be depleted for the initial take-off?
- xyzzyz 5y agoUnless you literally tow it for many minutes to cruising altitude, whatever push you can give it in the ground won’t really amount to much, compared to the energy use for the rest of the trip. Imagine you’re embarking on a cross country road trip, and someone offers to initially tow you to get you to 60mph, but then leave you on your own. Will that save you a lot fuel? Obviously not.
- ZeroGravitas 5y agoThe most effective technology for hard to decarbonize sectors like flight is a carbon tax. It simultaneusly: - reduces usage by pricing in the externality and changing consumer preferences - makes existing alternatives (trains, boats, zoom calls) more competitive - funds efficiency improvements in current tech - gives a clear business case for developing new alternative approaches - can be used to fund fundamental research - can be used to accelerate uptake of low hanging fruit in other areas, postponing the time that the new solution is required in the hard to decarbonize sector. Having said that, electric flight looks like it'll generate a lot of interesting stuff, but like in EVs it'll be the short, regular flights that'll switch first. Uber has a conference with talks online on youtube that has lots of interesting information about this in the context of urban air taxis, e.g. working around noise limitations on city airports, new design possibilities etc.
- chinathrow 5y agoThey are actually a YC funded company. https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/wright-electric https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/wright-electric