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Batteries are still too heavy and take too long to recharge for most commercial travel by plane. If we had better batteries, planes would become electric. Hydr

by pg_bot 4y ago

Batteries are still too heavy and take too long to recharge for most commercial travel by plane. If we had better batteries, planes would become electric. Hydrogen has an infrastructure problem. Planes aren't designed for holding hydrogen and they would need to be redesigned entirely to accommodate for using it as a fuel. Hydrogen is hard to store and transfer as it tends to embrittle a wide variety of metals. There are also no hydrogen refueling stations near airports, you would have to build all of that infrastructure as well. You might be able to generate hydrogen on demand via a chemical reaction with something like NaOH and Silicon or Aluminum, but I haven't run the numbers to see if that would be technically possible, economically feasible, or safe for passenger travel. Theoretically you could use hydrogen, but it would cost trillions of dollars to get everything up and running without some sort of breakthrough.

panick21_ 4y ago
For the distances need to be viable in a lot of regions we are pretty close. Current companies are targeting something like 400km. And that is with pretty conservative design choices along every dimension. With some real investment that would allow companies to embrace more ambitious designs we could do much more then that. Batteries can be a structural part of the plane. You can use the airflow to cool them potentially. There are lots of opportunity to do much, much better. I think the connection between most major capital is around 500km. So an 20-30 seat plane that can go 600+ km is really not that far away as people think. And this is with batteries that are not really optimized for flight. You can push the charge speed up considerably if you are willing to have less cycles. And it very well might be worth to do that. Even so your total investment in electricity and batteries combined is still gone beat fossil fuel by a wide margin. If we are talking about investing billion into something, it should be electric planes!

by pg_bot 4y ago

panick21_ 4y ago

For the distances need to be viable in a lot of regions we are pretty close. Current companies are targeting something like 400km. And that is with pretty conservative design choices along every dimension. With some real investment that would allow companies to embrace more ambitious designs we could do much more then that. Batteries can be a structural part of the plane. You can use the airflow to cool them potentially. There are lots of opportunity to do much, much better. I think the connection between most major capital is around 500km. So an 20-30 seat plane that can go 600+ km is really not that far away as people think. And this is with batteries that are not really optimized for flight. You can push the charge speed up considerably if you are willing to have less cycles. And it very well might be worth to do that. Even so your total investment in electricity and batteries combined is still gone beat fossil fuel by a wide margin. If we are talking about investing billion into something, it should be electric planes!