Hybrid and all-electric vehicles have revolutionized transportation and changed everything from emissions standards to charging infrastructures. Although aeronautical engineers have tried to take similar innovations to the skies, there are great obstacles to this application in practice. We are now even closer to electric air travel, thanks to the latest breakthroughs from a team of MIT engineers.One of the limiting factors of electric powered flight is the supporting technologies needed to generate enough power for sustained flight without major losses in weight and mobility. Current small-scale applications use electric motors capable of producing hundreds of kilowatts of power powered by multiple batteries, greatly increasing the aircraft’s weight while reducing its potential payload. For example, Heart Aerospace’s 19-passenger ES-30 aircraft carries 3.5 tons of batteries for a 400 km flight.
1 megawatt electric motor from MIT
Engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have taken an important step towards solving this problem by designing components to power a 1-megawatt engine that can power larger aircraft. According to MIT, engineers have successfully designed and tested the engine’s main components and performed computational analysis to prove that the components can work together to produce one megawatt of power while maintaining a footprint similar to smaller engines currently available.
According to the team’s engineers, the new megawatt electric motor could be powered by a battery or fuel cell to power an airplane’s propellers alone by converting stored electrical energy into mechanical energy. For even larger applications, the electric motor can supplement a conventional turbofan jet engine to operate as a hybrid propulsion system.While these breakthroughs are a big step towards electrifying the skies on a larger scale, the team at MIT isn’t the first to try electrically powered flight. The Tissandier Electric Airship, the first electrically powered aircraft, made its debut on October 8, 1883. Since then, dozens of prototypes, trials and small-scale production have taken place, but general-purpose use has not been possible. On the other hand, breakthroughs in power distribution mark an exciting milestone in aerospace technology.
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