The noticeable excitement around the ACCEL team is not solely focused on the imminent adrenaline rush that an all-electric air speed record attempt will bring. Every challenge overcome and every breakthrough made has a potential real-world application. And those applications are becoming clearer and getting closer by the day.
Take electric vertical take-off vehicles (eVTOL), for example, which in their initial form are may feature the versatility of helicopters, but with a much-reduced environmental impact. This vision for cleaner, quieter ways of navigating – and connecting - a city could see not only a transformation in the way people travel, but in the way cities are designed for increasingly urban, densely populated societies. We’re exploring a number of different types of eVTOL solutions, in both hybrid and all- electric-powered iterations. But key to making them viable, sustainable and capable of covering increasingly longer ranges at greater speeds will be the advancement of battery power technologies. Which is why the Spirit of Innovation’s battery, capable of reaching speeds of 300mph+ and completing a journey of over 100+ miles on charge feels like such an important stepping-stone.
Our learnings from the ACCEL project also feed into a number of projects that are focused on delivering an altogether more familiar type of electric air travel. Because we need propulsion systems that enable reduced fuel consumption and emissions, but without compromising aircraft endurance and performance, hybrid-electric technologies are set to become increasingly common on the types of aircraft we’re used to seeing today. One such example of this is our “H3PS” research project – so-called because it aims to demonstrate technology delivering 3 ‘H’s: ‘high power’, ‘hybrid powertrain’ and a ‘high-scalability aircraft’. The aircraft propeller can be powered by a combustion engine directly, an electric motor, or by both at the same time – with the aim of reducing fuel consumption while still maintaining and even extending the aircraft’s range. As with the Spirit of Innovation, we’re introducing these new technologies to a light aircraft initially… But also, as with the Spirit of Innovation, we’re doing so with a view to making them scalable for larger aviation aircraft.