Electric Airplanes - A near-future technology soon can blow our mind
Electric airplanes are not a new technology. The biggest reason why people want to go electric is the fact that we may not have any need to burn fossil fuels. There are already companies that are offering ways to stay in the air without burning any fossil fuel. Even though the duration is not more than 90 minutes. There is a high chance that this innovation can grow further in the future and efficiency would get increased. There are also companies that have provided that they can build planes that can stay as long as they want in the air with solar power and battery power.
It is exciting to talk about electric airplanes but there are so many challenges involved. For example, if we take a drone, we cannot keep it on air for several hours. The capacity of the batter should be made higher in order to do that. The same applies to electric airplanes too. We should be having a big load of batteries powering the plane. Let's not discuss the disadvantages now.
Emission free planes
The first thing that comes to our mind is the fact that these electric planes can be emission-free and people can travel from one place to another without disturbing the ecosystem with any big pollution. We are depleting fossil fuels at a high range. Unless we find a way to extract fuels from other sources or from even other planets, we can keep this going forever.
Many private companies have started exploring this. Already 2022 is considered to be one of the biggest years for electric vehicles. If we are able to save the fossil fuels and come up with emission free planes, it will be a great achievement for the year. I'm sure there will be engineering challenges, but there are already successful planes that gives a short-range commute.
Safety concerns
Some people think that it may not be safe to travel inside a flight that requires lots of batteries to power them. We currently have facilities to make solar panels in the form of thin sheets. If we come up with a technology to make the plane's body with panels, probably it will help in producing a lot of power that would be sufficient for a backup in the plane.
The safety concen is always there. Even with fossil fuels, there is a big concern that the flight would suddenly catch fire. This has also happend in the past. The same risk applies even for an electric airplane as batteries also have a small risk of explosion. But the biggest concern here is what if there is a short circuit mid air and the plane is not having enough power to go down again. A real aeronotical engineer would probably find these safety concerns funny but a common man would always think in this perspective.
A future technology that we can rely upon
My final thoughts would be that this is definitely going to happen for commercial passengers. I think these electric airplanes are already available for non-commercial flights. The duration and the cost is the biggest concern here. We cannot say it is fully eco-friendly. We would still be using Litium-ion batteries where the Litium becomes a fossil fuel here. But in spite of all that I would still like to see this technology becoming a very common reality because it is definitely better than the previous one.
Posted with STEMGeeks
