Future aircraft may taxi without engines
Baku, March 1 (AZERTAC). British engineers say they`re looking at ways to design aircraft that are able to generate electricity by harnessing energy from the landing gear. Researchers from the University of Lincoln say future aircraft could use this electricity to power the plane as it taxis to and from airport gates, reducing the need to use the jet engines. This would save on aviation fuel, cut emissions and reduce noise pollution at airports, Britain`s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council said Thursday in a release. The energy produced by a plane`s braking system during landing, currently wasted as heat produced by friction in the brakes, would be captured and converted into electricity by motor-generators built into the landing gear, engineers said. The electricity would be stored and then supplied to the in-hub motors in the wheels to provide "engine-less" taxiing, they said. "Taxiing is a highly fuel-inefficient part of any trip by plane with emissions and noise pollution caused by jet engines being a huge issue for airports all over the world," research leader Paul Stewart said. "Currently, commercial aircraft spend a lot of time on the ground with their noisy jet engines running," he said. "In the future this technology could significantly reduce the need to do that." The university`s research formed part of a project that aimed to assess the basic feasibility of as many ways of capturing energy from a landing aircraft as possible. "When an Airbus 320 lands, for example, a combination of its weight and speed gives it around three megawatts peak available power," Prof Stewart explained. "We explored a wide variety of ways of harnessing that energy, such as generating electricity from the interaction between copper coils embedded in the runway and magnets attached to the underside of the aircraft, and then feeding the power produced into the local electricity grid." The study showed that capturing energy direct from a plane`s landing gear and recycling it for the aircraft`s own use really could work, particularly if integrated with new technologies related to the more-electric or all-electric aircraft. Prof Stewart maintained, however, that a number of technical challenges would need to be overcome first. The main obstacle, he says, is weight. The project was carried out under the auspices of the EPSRC funded Airport Energy Technologies Network and was undertaken in collaboration with researchers at Loughborough University.
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