Boeing Working on Fuel Cell Aircraft

"Boeing is working with development partners on a fuel cell-based small aircraft. It seems like a logical use of the technology. Now if they can come up with a quiet, personal-sized VTOL craft a la Paul Moller's Skycar (which is anything but quiet), we'll really have something." From the article "A Boeing research director was quoted as saying, "While Boeing does not envision that fuel cells will provide primary power for future commercial passenger airplanes, demonstrations like this help pave the way for potentially using this technology in small manned and unmanned air vehicles."

Re:More kinetic energy is bad

[Loke the Dog]

And automobile accidents is actually a big deal today, so I guess they were right too.

Re:Skycar

[QuantumG]

No, what's needed is vertical take off and landing vehicles for that price which don't make insane amounts of noise or vent extremely hot gases in a way that is dangerous to third parties. Without that, you can't replace a car with a plane, assuming that's what you want.. I know it's what I want.

It's not the engines which are noisy

[M0b1u5]

It's not the engines which are noisy on Moller's ultra-dangerous thing (I refuse to dignify it with the title "car" or "aircraft" as it is neither) it's the fans/propellers which make all the noise. You simply can't move lots of air without making a hell of a racket.

See: Overclocked PCs, Helicopters, Jet Engine, extractor fan, air conditioner, Vacuum cleaner...

It wouldn't matter if Moller's thing had fuel cells - it would just as noisy.

Re:Skycar

[YrWrstNtmr]

No, what's needed is vertical take off and landing vehicles for that price which don't make insane amounts of noise or vent extremely hot gases in a way that is dangerous to third parties.

And to do that we just need to suspend the laws of physics. Unless you know of another way of lifting 2,000 lbs straight up in the air.

Re:More kinetic energy is bad

[mgv]

And automobile accidents is actually a big deal today, so I guess they were right too.

Considering that 3000 people die per day from car accidents around the world, what we have is a disaster of the proportion of september 11, done daily.

Generally speaking, most countries seek to blame the individual driver. Most airlines seek to fix the system. And when you look at what they have had to do to make planes safe, its pretty clear that few of us really have a right to lift a few tons of metal into the air over any place that people are.

The real question that society needs to ask is how much it can justify letting so many people drive cars right now.

Just some food for thought. Wont really matter too much anyway, the oil will probably get too expensive before many people can afford this sort of technology. We will need what is left to fly the efficient, big planes.

And no, I would be bitterly opposed to people having flying cars, even if the technology made it possible.

My 2c

Michael

Re:Ultralights

[myrdos2]

Wouldn't a fuel-cell engine be essentially an electric engine?

-Yes, the fuel cell takes in hyrodgen and outputs electricity, which runs an electric motor.

Would it be quieter than a gasoline engine? More reliable?

Yes, and yes. Electric engines are virtually silent, and have far less moving parts than internal combustion engines.

Would there be any odor?

No, the only output from a fuel cell is water vapour.

If so, they would be ideal for ultralights:

Maybe! Your main problem here is fuel density. On the one hand, electric engines are around 95% efficient, compared to gasoline engines which are around 35% efficient. On the other hand, hydrogen isn't very dense - a liquid hydrogen tank requires roughly three times the volume of a gasoline tank with similar energy. (It also needs to be very well insulated) And by eyeballing the picture, it looks like they're using a compressed tank, not liquid. Probably one of those new 10,000 psi tanks, this being Boeing. Even at that pressure, the energy density's going to be a lot less than liquid hydrogen.

I note that they don't mention the range or price, which are going to be very small and very large, respectively. A fuel cell alone can set you back 30,000$ US. The cheapest I've seen for a complete system that can power a car is $60,000 US.

Re:Skycar

[onescomplement]

If I were their director of marketing:

"The Skycar remains perfectly positioned for the expected invention of antigravity."

Re:It's not the engines which are noisy

[M0b1u5]

Acoustic optimisation can onyl get you so far. In other words, you reduce fans/propellors from "an ear damaging roar" to simply "extremely fucking loud". There's only so much you can do to quieten fans;

You can get cute and use TMD (Tip Magnetic Drive) fan blades, which have no ends (its thought that tip vortex at the end of fan blades is responsible for much of the noise associated with fans and blades) and you could spend millions designing the most efficient blades possible.

Hell, you could even bet that in a few years the next generation of memetic polyalloys (T1000 et al) or "memory metals" will even allow the actual blades to change shape depending on their rotational speed, thus reducing noise still further.

But the fact remains, on a 2000 KG car, you need at least 2000 KG of vertical thrust to keep it in the air, and 2000 KG of thrust is a LOT. Are you seriously suggesting that fan blades can be made as quiet as say - a 5-litre V8 car at 6000 rpms? No way. Not gonna happen. Not ever.

Unless some way can be made to shift large amounts of air, efficiently, with no blades at all, then the Moller thing will never be anything more than a fucking dangerous, extremely noisy experimental demonstrator.

I'm still hanging out for effective anti-gravity. After all, it's such a weak force, that 2 AA batteries should be powerful enough to keep your car airborn for a year or so. Then all you need is some way to move it about, and you only need one engine for that - so it'd be much quieter.

Re:It's not the engines which are noisy

[uradu]

Actually, it's not the movement of air as much as you think. With all the "noisy air mover" examples you listed, the majority of the noise comes from the bearings in the electric motors and whatever they drive. Disconnect the belt in your vacuum and see if it gets much quieter--it most likely won't. Check out noisy power tools such as table saws and routers, it's almost always the bearings making all the racket. With PCs you can really notice that when the bearings in a fan go bad--the low noise that was always there at a muffled level suddenly gets loud and shrieking. =

Re:More kinetic energy is bad

[khallow]

Keep in mind that most such deaths occur in the Third World which is notorious for bad traffic laws and infrastructure. In the US it's somewhere around 100 deaths per day despite our far greater miles driven per capita.