Electric planes that could fly cleaner and transport hundreds of people thousands of miles depend on more powerful batteries and motors than those used in today’s electric cars. Although shorter-range electric planes and electric air taxies, including electric vertical-takeoff-and-landing (EVTOL) that carry a few people short distances nearby (from downtown to the airport) could be commercially available by next year (2025), the dream goal is to electrify large planes that take off and land like regular jet-fueled airplanes. Professor Kiruba Haran said, “To fly an airplane you need two big things: power to propel them forward and energy to keep them flying for a long duration.”
Energy is centered on batteries and fuel cells. Batteries for EVOLS and electric planes require higher density than those used in electric cars, because it takes so much energy to get them off the ground. This involves addressing battery weight and heat tolerance. To that end, Halle Cheeseman, a program director for the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) announced that 12 teams will receive a total of $15 million to try to develop batteries and energy storage systems with about four times as much energy density as current technologies, with the goal of electrifying a plane that could convey up to 100 people for 1,000 miles. Illinois-based battery materials startup Natrion, co-founded by CEO Alex Kosyakov, along with NASA, and others are developing solid-state faster-charging batteries that can tolerate much higher temperatures.
Propulsion is the focus of Professor Haran and others, including Toshiba and Airbus. They are building superconducting motors that can generate megawatts of power using superconducting materials, which have “no resistance, minimal heat loss and can carry more current, meaning less material — and less weight.” Kiruba remarked, “Superconducting materials hold the promise of being ‘very efficient, very lightweight, power dense.’” However, they must be cooled to exceedingly low temperatures. A possible solution is to use “the energy generated from vaporizing liquid hydrogen into fuel to cool the superconductor.” Another is hybrid turboelectric planes with gas turbines to drive electric motors.
Kiruba noted, “For the last 50 years, people have been making electric machines ‘incrementally better.’ Now they have a ‘clean sheet’ for designing ‘a really efficient propulsion system … We’re trying to reinvent the electric machine.’”

This article is extracted from a Grainger College of Engineering Electical & Computer Engineering News item written by Alison Snyder and Joann Muller from “Axios” in the February 24, 2024 issue of Science https://www.axios.com/science