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Re:Solar Impulse lands in California after Pacific crossing by dogma1138 on Sunday April 24, 2016 @08:06AM (#11559414)
Flight actually doesn't scale up that well, especially with solar.
Re:Solar Impulse lands in California after Pacific crossing by Retric on Sunday April 24, 2016 @08:19AM (#11559438)
OK, it's better than 1:1 vs cargo even for solar assuming you alter the design to fit your new scale. Beyond that, it's a question of what you want to call "Well" :)
Re:Solar Impulse lands in California after Pacific crossing by dogma1138 on Sunday April 24, 2016 @09:41AM (#11559652)
No it doesn't scale 1:1 or any way else at least not in any specific manner.

The scaling depends on how much lift you generate, the lift is a question of speed and your the available lift surface the nominal lift produced is then divided by surface area to give you your wing loading.

Solar is pretty much the most inefficient way of powering virtually any aircraft because you needlessly increase the weight of the lifting surface and batteries weight considerably more than fuel and that weight is dead weight during the entire flight while a fueled aircraft becomes lighter.

That said the scaling between the volume and the "surface area" isn't even in question here because you are going to be hitting a wall much quicker and that's takeoff weight as mentioned before lift is a factor of the surface area that can provide lift and the speed of the aircraft (as well as air density and some other things but lets ignore it) the heavier the aircraft the more energy you need to actually get to takeoff speeds, and when you make your lift surface bigger you increase drag as well as weight.

The speed you can reach is going to be more or less limited because even a 100% efficiency solar powered engines are going to be limited to the max cell efficiency * cell surface area, the 2nd part of the equation is your wing surface and eventually there is a limit to how big your wings can be and still support themselves and most importantly not flutter. When you take all that and more into account there is absolutely no fucking way that you'll make an aircraft capable of lifting a 50,000lbs of crago, heck you won't build a solar aircraft capable of lifting 50,000 lbs of anything including itself. To put that into perspective 50,000lbs is 1/6th of the maximum structural load that a 747-8F (freighter) can carry, and about 1/4th of the nominal cargo load.

To put it into even more perspective Solar Impulse weights 3000 lbs, it's maximum takeoff weight is about 4000 lbs and it has a max speed of 80km/h with a wing span greater than that of a 747. To put it simply there is no freaking way to scale this up, there is a good reason why nature haven't developed heavy flyers the heaviest bird capable of flight weights 35 lbs, the rule of thumb is that when you double the weight you need a 4th time as much wing area and spend 4 times more calories to achieve flight and while mechanical flight isn't exactly the same it's not that different - the amount of energy you can produce more or less limits how well you can fly because at the end if you stick 2 SRB's to a cargo container you don't even need wings.

P.S. And that's before we getting into finding a material light enough to be viable for solar flight while still being able to bare the load of 50,000 lbs without collapsing, but even if you'll take perfect carbon nano tubes or any other super material you still won't be getting off the ground.

If you want solar cargo air transport blimps are probably the way to go...

Re:Solar Impulse lands in California after Pacific crossing by Retric on Sunday April 24, 2016 @11:12AM (#11559909)
Try and make a solar powered fixed wing aircraft fly at 43 mph while being 1 foot wide and reserving 25% of it's weight for cargo and keeping it in the air for 36 hours. You have 45 kW / (200 ^ 2) = 1.1 watts peak solar output to work with.

The issue with overly large wings is mechanical stress let's try and get around that.

<This is a dumb design> As a thought experiment, take 3 Solar impulse aircraft fly them next to each other with a simple non weight baring cable to share power between them. The outer two can clearly provide more power than they need and supply that extra power to the center one. Now the center one has extra power for 'free'. So, it can have a higher angle of attack and more weight.

As to scaling birds, a Quetzalcoatlus had a wing span of 9 to 12 meters. That's huge for a land animal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quetzalcoatlus Birds are limited by biology not so much aerodynamic issues.

Re:Solar Impulse lands in California after Pacific crossing by dogma1138 on Sunday April 24, 2016 @11:30AM (#11559962)
Birds are definitely limited by aerodynamics, biology just says well screw this it ain't worth it because life forms are limited by the amount of energy available to them. If we take the heaviest flying bird today it has a wing span of about 3M and a total wing surface of slightly under 1 m/sq the Quetzalcoatlus you've mentioned has a wing span of about 15m and a total wing surface of about 35 m/sq, back of the envelope math means that about a mass increase of about 12 times over the Kori (heaviest bird capable of flight) results in about 30-35 times the increase in lift surface (and we are still unclear if the damn thing was even capable of powered flight or not).

And again you are missing the point Solar Impulse can lift about 1000 lbs of w/e if you want to scale it up either increase the thrust by 50 or increase your lift surface by 50 to get to that 50,000 lbs cargo you want. If we ignore load baring and drag than 3 Solar Impulse aircraft combined could lift 3000 lbs that's it.

We can argue about this till the sun doesn't shine it won't change the fact that solar flight will never be a viable option for cargo transport. But it can replace other things, things that for example are well in range of the 1000 or lbs of payload that any reasonable designed solar aircraft could carry - surveillance, communications, weather and atmospheric monitoring equipment etc. They could potentially replace satellites, and increase the endurance of both military and civilian drones considerably but no one is looking at them to carry cargo because it's simply silly.

Also if you want to move 50,000 lbs today by air it usually won't take less than 6 days, the only thing you can really ship overnight are small things that end up going on commercial flights not cargo flights. And while it's also true that a container ship can take 21-30 days from say China to the US about 14-15 of those days are spent in local transit and loading, the sailing it self a cargo ship can do within 10 days of good weather with the average being probably closer to 12 or so days due to weather and fuel economy.

Re:Solar Impulse lands in California after Pacific crossing by Retric on Sunday April 24, 2016 @12:17PM (#11560179)
The problem with shipping by boat is the variability. Your just in time supply chain needs to assume a ~6 weeks or longer in case of a strike etc. Variability goes down a little when you have more boats going to more ports.

As a final point on energy larger birds can do generally have a slower metabolism. They simply need less energy per lb to maintain flight and can travel longer distances on smaller per pound energy budgets.

Not that I think anything could convince you, but look into glide ratios and optimum glide speeds. If A and B have 15:1 ratios and B glides at 2x the speed that's more efficient.

Re:Solar Impulse lands in California after Pacific crossing by dogma1138 on Sunday April 24, 2016 @01:50PM (#11560603)
No matter how many tricks you play eventually it comes to 2 things.

Amount of thrust (limited by solar power) * lift surface limited by materials and physics, it all boils down to math. http://www.ajdesigner.com/phpwinglift/wing_lift_equation_for...

So I really don't see any way of a solar power aircraft which uses aerodynamic lift getting of the ground even in the most perfect unattainable conditions.

Re:Solar Impulse lands in California after Pacific crossing by Retric on Sunday April 24, 2016 @02:21PM (#11560710)
A they already built a solar aircraft and B they say it can scale to 50x the size and carry 50 people. IMO, that would be more useful for lifting cargo vs people.

Second wing area and lift is related to velocity (not power) right before you stall outside of that it's a looser connection. Velocity is indirectly related to power in steady level flight based on drag. Drag in level flight is a function of weight, shape, altitude, and velocity.

Economicly I don't think this is a good idea. Physically it seems possible with cheaper and more efficemt solar cells it might make this more reasonable up to a point. Especially if they can boost altitude and thus speed.

Re:Solar Impulse lands in California after Pacific crossing by dogma1138 on Sunday April 24, 2016 @04:39PM (#11561279)
Yes they've built an airplane with the wing span of a 747 and a lower lift than a Cessna. Please show me where they stated that they can scale it 50x the size, that would mean it will have a wing span of 10000 feet, that's 10 Eiffel towers....
Re:Solar Impulse lands in California after Pacific crossing by Retric on Sunday April 24, 2016 @05:12PM (#11561398)
The article says electric aircraft holding 50 people in 50 years. Granted, not pure solar aircraft but electric.

50x the power takes 50x the surface area and 7.1x the length / width. Or less than that with a lifting body approach. Or significantly less than that if it's daytime only.

Re:Solar Impulse lands in California after Pacific crossing by dogma1138 on Sunday April 24, 2016 @05:58PM (#11561550)
I've seen 2 things there 1. electric and 2. 50 people nothing to do with 50x time size. The Solar Impulse can lift up about 5 people as it is (if there was room), scaling it to 50 might might be possible but cargo, and at the weight you were talking about no sorry not going to happen.

Solar Impulse is a marvel of engineering, and the fact that during on of the legs of the flight a single person flew the damn thing for 6 days straight is an attestment to human ingenuity and courage but there is a very very big difference between flying 50 people using electric aircraft (again electric not specifically solar) in 50 years to flying 50,000 of lbs on solar power.

We already have electric aircraft capable of 1.5-2h of flight scaling those up on electric power alone without solar might actually be easier as you do not inherit the weight of the solar panels. Efficient fuel cells and ultra light batteries / nano super caps could potentially make electric flight possible within 50 years but again relying on solar to transport cargo long haul no sorry not happening.

Re:Solar Impulse lands in California after Pacific crossing by Retric on Sunday April 24, 2016 @11:02PM (#11562356)
Li-ion battery's are 0.265 kWh per kg. Over a 2 hour flight the lightest thin film solar cells produce 12kWh. Battery's might be improving but not 50x as good. See 6w per gram: http://news.mit.edu/2016/ultrathin-flexible-solar-cells-0226

You would probably want a thicker coating to protect the cell, but in 50 years solar can add very minimal weight.

Re:Solar Impulse lands in California after Pacific crossing by thescriptkiddie on Sunday April 24, 2016 @12:18PM (#11560183)
I'd like to propose that both you and Retric are more-or-less right, if not for exactly the right reasons. Your post gets down to the real issue right at the end: the actual limiting factor for a craft like solar impulse is the strength of the wings, and the best way to get around that is to use a lifting-body rigid airship.
Re:Solar Impulse lands in California after Pacific crossing by dogma1138 on Sunday April 24, 2016 @12:46PM (#11560307)
That's why i said blimps are the way to go. Lifting body also has it's limit, at the end solar just can't provide enough thrust for heavy lifting, if the lifting it self is done through other means such as buoyancy then it's not an issue as solar can provide enough thrust for actually going forward as well as power the compressors to control the buoyancy of the craft.

Anything that will be dependent on aerodynamic lift alone literally won't be getting of the ground with any significant payload.