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Comment by sokka_h2otribe | Hacker News Reader

I am not clear about your description.

Electric propellor planes have similar problems at high altitude that you're pushing thin air.

What are the efficiency gains you're thinking about?

Think of it this way, if I took 1lb of air on the ground and put it into a box that box would have sides of x. As I go up x gets bigger because pressure is dropping with altitude so to get the same mass of air I need a bigger box. When you burn fuel you need a ratio of fuel to air that is determined by mass, not volume so I need to take that really big box at altitude and squeeze it down a lot to get the same density as at sea-level (and then squeeze it even more to get the right mixture in the combustion section). The thing is though, 'hot air rises' so just squeezing down to 1 atmosphere of pressure air at altitude is way hotter than the air on the ground and then you squeeze it even more to get it to the density you need for the engine and it is -really- hot. Engines are generally torque limited on the ground and TIT limited at altitude because as they go up you are power limited by TIT (turbine inlet temp, or some other temp limit related to the engine) because of this compression. Designing engines that can handle that massive heat and that massive force is really hard, but electric has the huge benefit of just needing to produce torque so it is way easier to build and can keep producing power at much higher altitudes. There are definitely challenges there, but they are likely much easier than solving both the heat and torque problems that jet engines have.

Duuuuuude, TIT is the temperature after combustion, not compression. Adiabatic compression isn't even close to the main contributor to TIT--heat input from burning fuel is. Also you may be confusing turbofans and turboshafts--helicopters have torque limits (not a helo guy, but my understanding is this is a gearbox or masthead structural limit rather than an engine limit), but if your turbofan can't hit RPM limits on the ground on a cool day you should seriously consider bringing it back for maintenance instead of going flying.

There are a lot of variations. I am most familiar with turbo props so shaft hp is the limiter on the ground and TIT is the limiter at altitude. TIT, of course, gets most of the heat from burning and I did mess up my explanation a bit. Sorry about that! You may be surprised how much of that TIT comes from compression though. The main point still stands, check the temp of that compressed air at sea level vs at altitude and for the same PSI out of the compressor you get a lot more heat at altitude. Either way though, the original point remains, electric has no TIT limit and you don't have to deal with 1000c materials spinning at 100k RPM so way simpler and easier to build something that keeps delivering thrust at extreme altitudes.

The thinner the air, the more efficient your flight can be, but I never saw this as a temperature problem. My understanding is that there just isn't enough oxygen. Maybe there's an issue with the amount of heating that occurs when you try to compress enough air to get enough oxygen to run your engine?

In any case, electric engines don't need oxygen.

> can be

Theory != Practice. If that were the only variable, then yes. Electric would be great. But it's not. It's far from the only thing in play. Lift also suffers from thinner air. Pure electric (as-in battery/solid state energy storage) could have 100% efficiency (specifically in converting prop/turbine torque to thrust of moving air), and it'd still have a terrible efficiency problem with current day tech.

Electric's primary efficiency and efficacy issue is regarding the total operating weight of the aircraft compounded by how that weight does not meaningfully decrease as the battery banks are depleted as compared to consumable fuels. Weight is your biggest enemy in flight, not power nor mechanical efficiency.

Hybrid electric (be it consumable fuel through a generator or fuel cells) is much more promising, but rarely what people mean when discussing "electric propulsion" (without the hybrid qualifier), and still has issues of it's own.

thinner the air, harder it is to generate lift as well.

Coffin corner is a real thing.

if you stay subsonic. I hear the U-2 has like 1-2kt of leeway when it is at its max altitude because if it went faster it would be supersonic but any slower and it would fall out of the sky.

To the point where, if you turned too hard, you could stall one wing tip while Mach buffeting the other.

Obligatory plug for the excellent book Skunk Works by its former director, Ben Rich.

+1, immensely satisfying read for any aviation nut

Unless you're prepared to go supersonic. Not easy to do with electric propulsion though.

Pretty sure for electric aircraft to do anything useful at supersonic speeds you'd need beamed energy. Which would be a pretty cool technology

Scimitar props are pretty tame, though, or what part do you mean is hard?

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