Gyro planes are so bonkers. Weird love child of a plane, a helicopter, and a hang glider.
AmphibianNext
For some reason the “low battery, low battery”. Flashing on the screen of drone footage comes to mind.
in_allium
> The self-charging hybrid-electric engine does not require e-charging facilities and can run on a range of available fuels, including hydrogen.
So … what’s the deal here? There are two questions that come to mind: one about “self-charging” and one about the fuel.
We all know self-charging is a dumb term that’s used in bad faith by Toyota marketing, but this aside it means we’re regenerating energy from one place and using it somewhere else. This seems to make sense in an autogyro; the principle of operation is that you push the aircraft forward (using a propeller) while holding the freely-spinning rotor at an angle. This forward motion then spins the rotor which generates both lift and drag. Pitching the rotor further back means the wind hits the rotor at a steeper angle, spinning it faster, and you get more lift (and drag — there is no free lunch) and thus climb; pitching the rotor forward means that the wind hits it at a shallower angle, spinning it slower and giving less lift.
It seems like their trick might be to avoid the mechanical complexity of a variable tilt rotor and instead connect the rotor to a motor-generator and battery. When you want to climb, you draw power out of the battery to spin the rotor faster yourself rather than waiting on the air to do it; when you want to descend, you slow the rotor down using the usual regenerative braking, storing the energy back in the battery.
If that’s how it works, that’s clever. Presumably you can transfer extra power from the primary driveshaft (that turns the propeller to make the whole thing go) to the batteries or vice versa.
But it’s “self-charging” (bah) so presumably the primary propulsion comes from an engine that runs on something else. Is it a combustion engine? Fuel cells (they mention hydrogen)? Who knows.
4 Comments
Look, a helicopter.
Gyro planes are so bonkers. Weird love child of a plane, a helicopter, and a hang glider.
For some reason the “low battery, low battery”. Flashing on the screen of drone footage comes to mind.
> The self-charging hybrid-electric engine does not require e-charging facilities and can run on a range of available fuels, including hydrogen.
So … what’s the deal here? There are two questions that come to mind: one about “self-charging” and one about the fuel.
We all know self-charging is a dumb term that’s used in bad faith by Toyota marketing, but this aside it means we’re regenerating energy from one place and using it somewhere else. This seems to make sense in an autogyro; the principle of operation is that you push the aircraft forward (using a propeller) while holding the freely-spinning rotor at an angle. This forward motion then spins the rotor which generates both lift and drag. Pitching the rotor further back means the wind hits the rotor at a steeper angle, spinning it faster, and you get more lift (and drag — there is no free lunch) and thus climb; pitching the rotor forward means that the wind hits it at a shallower angle, spinning it slower and giving less lift.
It seems like their trick might be to avoid the mechanical complexity of a variable tilt rotor and instead connect the rotor to a motor-generator and battery. When you want to climb, you draw power out of the battery to spin the rotor faster yourself rather than waiting on the air to do it; when you want to descend, you slow the rotor down using the usual regenerative braking, storing the energy back in the battery.
If that’s how it works, that’s clever. Presumably you can transfer extra power from the primary driveshaft (that turns the propeller to make the whole thing go) to the batteries or vice versa.
But it’s “self-charging” (bah) so presumably the primary propulsion comes from an engine that runs on something else. Is it a combustion engine? Fuel cells (they mention hydrogen)? Who knows.