Electric Airliners: Finding the Missing Ingredients Written 27 July 2015
Panelists: Moderator Rubén Del Rosario, NASA’s Glenn Research Center; Michael Armstrong, Rolls-Royce; Marty Bradley, Boeing Co.; Andrew Gibson, Empirical Systems Aerospace Inc.; Charles Lents, United Technologies Research Center; Johannes Stuhlberger, Airbus
by Ben Iannotta, Editor-in-Chief, Aerospace America
Creating an electric passenger plane capable of carrying more than 100 people will require persistence and an unprecedented cross-domain collaboration among aircraft designers, battery makers and the auto and marine industries, said members of a panel at the 2015 AIAA Propulsion and Energy Forum in Orlando, Florida.
“How do we get all these different communities, all these different subject-matter experts, together to go and execute a real system?” asked Marty Bradley, a technical fellow at Boeing Co. and chairman of AIAA’s Green Engineering Program Committee.
Bradley and other experts spoke during the session “Aircraft Electric Propulsion — Bridging the Gap.”
Bradley suggested that AIAA could play a major role in bringing together multiple disciplines, starting within the aerospace sector itself.
“We had some meetings on this, and we had at least five or six committees that all thought they had a share in this. So getting that group of people organized in joint sessions like this is a good start,” Bradley said.
The panelists waded into the question over the feasibility of developing a large commercial aircraft that would be powered by fuel and electricity — a hybrid — perhaps on the way to an all-electric aircraft. Moderator Rubén Del Rosario of NASA’s Glenn Research Center, paraphrasing a question submitted online, steered the discussion to whether miracles were needed before a hybrid propulsion system could be enabled.
“I’ll throw out the systems integration challenge here,” chimed in Charles Lents, a principal research engineer with the United Technologies Research Center.
Andrew Gibson, president of Empirical Systems Aerospace Inc., said questions about thermal management and power distribution are hot on his mind. Beyond that, he said, “I’m more concerned about the miracles that need to happen in how these cross-discipline teams operate.”
Steering the conversation back to the technical realm, Bradley said he sees only one miracle required: “That’s in energy storage.”
Johannes Stuhlberger, a power system expert with Airbus, lauded the auto industry for creating consumer confidence in batteries through the excellent safety record of hybrid autos.
That’s “a great success, I would say, because in the beginning, everyone was afraid about batteries, instantaneous burning and things like that,” Stuhlberger said.
Michael Armstrong, an aerospace systems engineering specialist with Rolls-Royce, said aerospace experts must look “at multiple industries to pull from,” but he also gave a nod to the auto industry.
“Without their assistance in this area, we would have a longer haul to get where we need to go,” Armstrong said.
Bradley volunteered that he drives a Chevrolet Volt.
“I’m trying to reverse engineer,” Bradley said. “Wouldn’t it be better if I was meeting with the engineers at General Motors. Now, I wonder: Have we done things like that?”
Armstrong said he works with technologists at Rolls-Royce who have expertise with hybrid buses and vehicles. He said the best advice is sometimes “what things not to do.”
The challenge will be in translating vehicle technology to aircraft, Armstrong said. “What does a hybrid car look like versus what does a hybrid aircraft look like? There are differences that we’ll have to make sure that we respect.”