And if EV planes become a reality, how much faster can it fly?
In: Engineering
It doesn’t make financial nor economic sense.
Aero engines have always been designed to maximize efficiency at every step, because a more efficient engine burns less fuel, and less fuel means less cost to operate per hour. This is extremely lucrative and has pushed the current state of the art for aero engine efficiency to 40% with the latest engines in service on the airbus neo family and the boeing maxes. Fully 40% of the energy in the fuel becomes useful thrust.
For a car, it’s 5%.
For an EV car, the battery pack only needs to store that 5% of useful energy or so.
For an EV plane, the battery needs to be eight times more energy dense. Beyond this, the battery is a fixed weight – planes fuel as little as needed to minimize non-revenue weight and batteries would disallow this.
Air travel does have electrification coming to it – but not where you might think. Taxiing is a major contributor to aircraft emissions, and electric taxiing is expected to be the Next Big Thing. Instead of needing to run the main engines for twenty minutes on a long taxi out, a plane can just use the APU to power two electric motors in the main gear to taxi out with the big mills at a stop, only starting them in the last phase of taxiing and doing a runup right as they’re lined up for takeoff.
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