Solar flight earns its wings
Share
This week’s Futurescope literally takes off from the Dübendorf Airfield in Switzerland where the first solar powered aircraft designed to fly night and day without fuel achieved its first ‘flea hop’.
The aircraft, dubbed Solar Impulse HB-SIA and piloted by Markus Scherdel, is 21.85m long and combines a lightweight 1,600kg structure with a 63.4m wingspan.
Designed to show what can be achieved using renewable energy, Solar Impulse managed to fly 350m at an altitude of 1m.
‘This is the culmination of six years of intense work by a very experienced team of professionals! This first “flea hop” successfully completes the first phase of Solar Impulse, confirming our technical choices. We are now ready to start the next phase – the actual flight tests’, commented Andre Borschberg, co-founder and CEO of Solar Impulse.
According to Solar Impulse’s developers, from early 2010 onwards, the aircraft will be making its first solar test flights, increasing flight duration until it makes its first night flight using solar energy.
Closer to home, a research collaboration between Portsmouth University and Flight Data Services has developed technology that offers another possible glimpse of aviation’s future.
The team, which has just received the award for Best Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) in the South East from the Technology Strategy Board, developed a computer program that uses artificial intelligence to analyse data recorded in an aircraft’s black box.
The program highlights tiny anomalies in the recorded data after every flight that would not usually be identified. It flags up abnormalities that fall outside the airline’s standard safety parameters, which it can investigate and take remedial action if necessary before safety is compromised.
The team will now be entered for a national award.
Jason Ford
News Editor
Readers' comments (3)
IAN PACKINGTON | 5 Dec 2009 4:18 pm
'Solar Impulse' flight might seem to be 'a good idea'? But realism intervenes! Surely the estimable upper limits to direct solar energy capture (and thus the maximum propulsion energy available for solar-powered flight) are essentially trivial in comparison with current and ever-increasing demands for commercial aircraft engine power, payloads, journey distances and flight speeds? Any effective competitive technology surely requires a chemical fuel that is at least as energy dense as aviation spirit? And, of course, it must also be based on truly GREEN - sustainable and non-polluting - technology!
Only one viable system comes readily to mind. Onboard, easily refilled (and highly compressed) hydrogen and oxygen compartments must supply the essential fuel components to a 'super-jet' engine - one that can also operate way beyond the upper
atmospheric limits for air-supported jet flight. [There are, of course, no 'greenhouse gas' emissions at all - however such an engine is operated].
An engine of this kind would not simply remove a significantly harmful source of greenhouse gas emissions; it would immediately open up all the commercial possibilities for trans-global flight that were being researched, right up to the time of his death, by the late lamented and visionary pioneer, Sir Barnes Wallace. His swing-wing prototype aircraft "Swallow" was designed to reach Mach 3 or beyond while it rose to an optimal peak mid-journey altitude (in the stratosphere) before descending with gravitational assistance towards a destination on the other side of the planet. [Such 'long-haul' journeys would be far faster and significantly cheaper than currently operated international flight paths].
Water can be electrolysed cleanly and sustainably, via solar energy capture. Both gases can be suitably compressed and safely stored for appropriate mixing rates in any suitable kind of engine. [Bus fleets may well be operating by now, using 'free' electrolysed water in conjunction with current fuel cell technology? - so delivering truly green road travel? Commercially viable operating systems were undergoing systematic evaluation many years ago].
Surely it is imperative that global aviation (and, indeed all forms of transport) be effectively 'greened'? An international consortium should be set up immediately in order to develop hydrogen-based alternatives to hydrocarbon- and carbohydrate-based fuels and engines, whose ongoing and increasingly prolific use, however cleanly or otherwise, can never reverse global warming!
The largely unsupported belief that hydrogen is an inherently unsafe fuel must now be displaced via long overdue global technology that embraces its essentially green and safely exploitable potential. This alone must represent an enormous stride towards the possibility of maintaining an inhabitable Earth. Unrestricted population increase and its concomitant habitat destruction must remain the other totally unacceptable hazards that will otherwise operate to frustrate all otherwise laudable initiatives to promote a truly sustainable global ecology.
Unsuitable or offensive? Report this comment
Anonymous | 7 Dec 2009 1:46 pm
While hydrogen and oxygen can be produced from electrolyzing water it is inefficient to do so.
Much better to use this energy directly and burn hydrocarbons in the plane than inefficiently create H2 and O2 with the solar and burn far more hydrocarbons creating the equivalent amount of electricity on the ground.
I don't think anyone is suggesting solar passenger flights, the technology is far more suited to reconnaissance, weather monitoring and arial transmission relays where speed is required only to create lift (rather than to actually go anywhere).
Unsuitable or offensive? Report this comment
Anonymous | 8 Dec 2009 10:54 am
Well, as you guys said, it's probably hard to implement today but at least it's the first step to another green-energy-usage for transportation.
Unsuitable or offensive? Report this comment