What about electric propulsion with hydrogen fuel cell? Oxidizer from
ambient air, waste products overboard.
On Sun, Aug 1, 2021 at 13:39 Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sun, 1 Aug 2021, Jake Anderson wrote:--
I'd like to commute around 200km ideally in under 30 minutes...
I'm wondering if electric ducted fans are up to the job these days,
would be nice from a maintenance and cost perspective.
For sizes big enough to carry people, they're still very much in the
"experimental" heading, last I saw.
As for cost, the battery pack will not be cheap, and its lifetime is
likely to be short -- it's a consumable, not a one-time expense -- because
of trying to squeeze every last possible kJ/kg out of technology that's
only barely up to the job. (And the charger probably won't plug into an
ordinary outlet.) The combination of having to store all the reactants on
board (instead of getting the oxidizer from ambient air) and not being
able to dump the waste products overboard, gives batteries a *huge* mass
handicap against piston/turbine engines.
Although you wouldn't know if from the enthusiastic hype of its promoters,
electric aviation is still a very marginal technology that people are
trying to press into service prematurely because it's become fashionable.
There's a real possibility that all of them will be bankrupt, and the
technology written off as not yet ready for prime time, before the decade
is out.
Henry
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