Unfortunately the real limitation here is still weight. You can get excellent torque and incredible reliability from electric motors vs. gas powered engines but the biggest difference is that as you fly longer the plane gets lighter with a gas powered plane. With an electric plane you're always at full weight and that limits your flexibility.
Worse, batteries are still very, very heavy compared to the energy they store. I suspect that as battery technology improves we'll see a drastic shift toward electric planes being more appealing.
For GA aircraft they'd be amazing. Excellent power, significantly higher reliability, much lower maintenance costs, and much lower cabin noise. But at the weights listed, I can't imagine a Cessna 182 going electric anytime soon.
There have been some drones and experimental air vehicles where quadrotor-type electric props do the VTOL operation, and then a fuel-powered propeller and wings take over for efficient forward flight. This is one way to build a VTOL drone with serious range. (This is a big deal for the military, where limited range means fighting for and holding a string of bases to get to the area of interest.)
It seems wasteful to carry both systems, but it's simpler. The mechanical complexity of transition-type VTOLs is far worse. See the Osprey.
> Worse, batteries are still very, very heavy compared to the energy they store
Lithium-Sulfur batteries will help here. They have a higher gravimetric energy density than other battery chemistries. The main problem with Li-S batteries is the poor cycle life but progress is being made in improving that:
Regular 208 spends 150 kg per hour, which is microscopic by aviation standards. A piston An-2 spends the same, but in super expensive avgas, and flies half as slow. A more comparable DHC-3 flies a bit faster, at 135 kg per hour, again, avgas.
1000 kg of LFP cell will hold you in the air for just 20 minutes
Given that the useful load of a 208 is around 1500kg, 150kg/hour is by no means 'microscopic'. Yes, obviously compared to a 787 which burns 5000kg/hour it's a different story. But the useful load of a 787 is also much, much higher.
“Super expensive Avgas” — in Europe definitely, but in the US, JetA is pretty close in price. At Palo Alto Airport, full service 100LL is $4.15 per gallon and JetA is $3.44. In Europe, I think 100LL is something like $15 per gallon or thereabouts. Europe has managed to decimate general aviation compared to the US.
No. Aside from the fact that the weight of the electrons, although not zero, is negligible, they also don't get "lost" in the process... they just get moved around, in the case of battery power literally from one end of the batery to the other. Combustible fuel in contrast, gets turned into gases (CO2 and H2O) which are blown out the exhaust and thus lost.
Yes. A small amount. A 100kWh Tesla battery has 3.6e+8 Joules of energy. E = mc^2 tells us that the mass of the stored energy is 4e-9 grams, so 4 nanograms.
I wasn't referring to parent's suggestion that the number of electrons changed, of course, you're right, it doesn't. Just that the weight does in fact change.
> I wasn't referring to parent's suggestion that the number of electrons changed
So help me out here, am I missing something?
It's a two part question, and only half a part is actually true. "more electrons" is false, and "therefore" is false, but "heavier" is correct.
In that situation, I think an unqualified "Yes." is extremely misleading. So I wrote "No." as the lead-in for my comment.
Is that super rude? Am I completely wrong, and an unqualified "Yes." is actually appropriate here? Is there some other reason for me to get multiple downvotes for my post?
If I'm doing something wrong, I'd like to correct it for the future.
Yes, as it follows E = mc², but it would be so incredibly tiny that a speck of dust would weight more than the difference it would make between charged and discharged.
Worse, batteries are still very, very heavy compared to the energy they store. I suspect that as battery technology improves we'll see a drastic shift toward electric planes being more appealing.
For GA aircraft they'd be amazing. Excellent power, significantly higher reliability, much lower maintenance costs, and much lower cabin noise. But at the weights listed, I can't imagine a Cessna 182 going electric anytime soon.