Centennial Plate
Beamed Energy Propulsion and Onset of New Aeronautics
In 2003 we had a great centennial celebration of powered aircraft flight. A century of progress made a breathtaking path from fragile, toy-looking Kitty Hawk to something like B-2 Spirit, a prodigy of modern technology, which even looks like an alien warship from Star Wars. Could Orville and Wilbur Wright even imagine how far their enterprise of bicycle spokes and glued spruce would evolve over a hundred years?
There is a hope that the road of progress will not be always marked with rumble and smoke. The big change is ahead and this change will come from the worldwide exhaustion of fossil fuels. The day will come when every engine which gets in motion out of burning of natural hydrocarbons will stop for good. So what will come in its place, how we will keep all the gears of our mechanical world turning? It will be light. And turning to the aviation, the light will keep our aircraft flying longer and farther than one could ever dream.
The future aircraft will be powered by light and all buzz and smoke will become a history. New flyers, silent and smokeless, will be powered by sun light during the day and beamed energy of light during the night. These flyers will serve the needs of local, daily transportation instead of gasoline-burning cars of today. The range of daily routine transportation will change from several tens of miles to several hundred miles, the shift similar to one which happened with advent of affordable automobile and decline of horse-powered transport. In larger scale the new flyers will substitute jumbo jets as new long-distance carriers. Never again the price of jet fuel will dictate the costs of long-range travel.
So what will be the principal elements of such aircraft?
The bodies of new flyers will be made of lightweight composites. Upper wing surfaces will be plated with solar cells. During the day the cells will convert sun light into electricity, which will run aircraft motors. Some part of the energy will be collected by batteries, so in case of light outage (clouds or night time) the flyer could keep going. This may sound as a too much faith on bright sunlight and batteries: how about clouds and how about carrying heavy on-board batteries for night flights? Both issues can be solved entirely if beamed energy propulsion will become a part of the picture. This would require building of a network of power stations, but they would justify the construction costs hundredfold.
The tations can be placed on airborne aerostatic platforms, hanging at 3,000 to 5,000 ft altitude and charging passing-by aircraft with light beams from above. Equipped with spotlights or lasers (depends on the range and type of photovoltaic elements in use), such stations could serve approximately 120 square mile areas each. Alternatively, power-beaming sources can be placed on towers, so the planes will be charged from below. In this case photovoltaic cells matching the wavelength of beaming sources must be placed on lower surfaces of the flyers. Ground-based stations will have smaller range, but they will be somewhat easier in operation and maintenance and will cost less.
Electrical recharging from power stations will be somewhat similar to modern-day in flight fueling, however safety, affordability and simplicity of this process will be incomparably better. If you think that this process sounds too logistically challenging, the technology can take an intermediate step: charging of stationary (hovering) aircraft, the process somewhat similar to this day gas stations. When multiple tracking techniques will be developed, in-flight power-beaming will replace in-hovering charging. With new technology on-board batteries will be needed only for covering dark zones. When sun will rise the stations will be shut till sundown or, perhaps, some will stay on duty for a rainy day.
Hopefully, this future is lying on the path of our progress. Life of internal-combustion engines finally will come to an end and light-powered, individual owned aircraft will take place of modern cars. These aircraft will be capable of hovering, vertical take-off and landing (like modern day V-22 Osprey), and they will be delivering us on daily basis to our destinations without noise and smoke. How realistic is this picture? Well, there are flying full-scale prototypes, so how much realistic this needs to be? To read about emerging solar planes, please, read the story of Ron Laurenzo in May 09 issue of Aerospace America. To learn more about power-beamed transportation, please, visit the web site of American Institute of Beamed Energy Propulsion.
About the Author
Andrew Pakhomov is founder and president of American Institute of Beamed Energy Propulsion, a nonprofit scientific organization serving to development and popularization of this space technology of the future AIBEP He is also associate professor of physics at University of Alabama in Huntsville. You can read more about fascinating field of beamed-energy propulsion, please visit official site of AIBEP.
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