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Move over electric cars, here come electric planes:
Luckily, electrification isn't always an all-or-nothing proposition, especially in a plane with several engines. A new partnership from Airbus, Rolls-Royce and Siemens appears to take advantage of this fact. Dubbed the E-Fan X, this will be a demonstration hybrid aircraft which—initially—will have one of four gas turbine engines replaced by a two megawatt electric motor. But as the system matures, is demonstrated to be safe and, presumably, as battery costs come down, provisions will be made toward replacing a second turbine with another 2MW motor.
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A big part of the motivation for projects like this is, apparently, the European Commission's Flightpath 2050 Vision for Aviation, which includes a reduction of CO2 by 75%, reduction of NOx by 90% and noise reduction by 65%. The happy side effect, presumably, will be cleaner air, lower dependence on fossil fuels, and cheaper flights too.
If they put solar panels on top and wind turbines on the wings, they can recharge while they fly.
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Monday December 04 2017, @07:06PM
Bypass air already provides more than half the thrust in a typical turbofan, and a (certified) twin must be able to take off with one engine out, therefore logically the thrust from bypass air alone would be enough to get one airborne.
This is actually much more likely to be useful in takeoff and landing than in cruise, batteries could provide cover for peak thrust requirements and allow down-sizing the conventional engines. If you can fly on electric alone, just 10 mins of battery power on takeoff would get you past flap-retraction and gear up, which might make a hell of a difference to noise profiles for a start. Electric also offers other advantages like near-zero spool-up time (handy for go-arounds) and potential to do interesting things like contra-rotating fans without requiring insane gearing. If you can get re-gen charging in there too, from windmilling the fans, then with todays continuous descent approaches you could turn off the generators at top of descent and charge the batteries from zero and land on electric (probably nearly fully charged as well) - again, awfully good for noise reduction.