I find all this stuff sexy, in Australia we all live in a bit of a fantasy of energy, we export our LPG, Coal and Oil like it’s going out of fashion and the “green” movements of our parties ensure that subsidies and grants are available to clubs and organisations for being green. My home club of Kingaroy would be a perfect site to go for a huge grant for four elec whinches 2xmain and 2x retrieve. The runway area is 2000m x100m of grass right next to a bitumen runway, there is power available within 200m of both winch sites. The only problem is the fact that it’s a certified runway with probably 1-2 private movements per hour, so the local Shire council are unlikely to approve winching. It’s a pity as there is a coal mine 20km away and there is a planned coal mine next to the airstrip and we have elections soon. If there was ever a time to pitch an alternative to burning smelly dinosaur bones and reducing the noise foot print for our solar powered sport now is it
I guess the panacea is to have an electric winch next to a battery bank powered by solar panels. In Australia this is feesable given the space and sunshine, BUT here is the crux - it’s battery technology.
The future will have elec self launch gliders, elec tow planes, elec winches and all of this will be powered by a battery system that is dual use. The batteries will be in runway edges, house bricks and other structural items not just a battery.
You will wake up in your house that is a storage facility hooked to the grid, most of the time you will be a next exporter of energy.
Jump in your electric car and drive up to the field.
Unplug your elec self launch Libelle and plug your car in, your hangar will have a storage battery bank in the wall bricks.
Tow your glider out to the runway with your elec golf cart and launch into the wild blue yonder with your retractable self launch system with prop goverening.
Once airborne you will go find a big fat thermal and redeploy your self launch prop mast and reverse the prop to recharge your batteries thereby extending your range.
The next type of comps will be range comps that will allow much greater distances and speeds, perhaps one day we will see solar panels on wings that can feed power to the battery system built into the composite fibres.
Fly until sunset and head to the clubhouse for a beer.
I just don’t understand why so many on here are negative to people trying to improve things, because let’s face it if we don’t improve things our sport is dead.
Justin
Quote:
Originally Posted by Martin Gregorie[_6_]
On Sun, 02 Sep 2018 09:15:40 -0600, Dan Marotta wrote:
Didn't the German winch require being hooked up to the electrical grid?
It seems the one currently under discussion would be self contained and
portable (on the back of a truck).
All the electric winch designs I know about (and I assume the new US
design is similar) require three things: a power supply, a large electric
motor and a battery bank to act as a buffer between the first two items.
The German Electrowinde winch needs a 12-20 kw mains supply to feed a
220kw motor via its battery buffer, so the batteries aren't just for
decoration.
It seems to me that the winch motor and battery bank capacity will be
much the same whether the winch is configured as a towable trailer, on a
truck chassis or built into a permanent building: they all need the same
three part power train and it really doesn't matter whether the power
source is the mains, a COTS 12-12kw trailer generator parked alongside or
a truck with all three items installed on it.
A major issue for a mains-powered electric winch, in the UK anyway, is
the cost of cabling the airfield. We looked at it some years back: there
are four places were we put our winch - normally on one end of 04/22 and
less often on one end of 16/34 (obviously this is wind dependent), so
we'd need to wire up all four points on the field with buried cables, and
the winch points for 34 and 22 are both around 1km from the club house
and hence the nearest mains supply. Wiring our airfield would be quite
expensive. Consequently, we've gone with a Skylaunch running on LPG
(cheap and environmentally benign fuel). And we already had the tractor
used to move it between garage and the day's winchpoint.
What's the point? Why not just use a piston engine for the winch then?
Because a (much) smaller engine driving a generator to keep the battery
bank topped up is probably more economical to run than a socking great V8
being running intermittently at high power, particularly when you include
the cost of wear and tear from temperature-cycling the big engine.
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Martin | martin at
Gregorie | gregorie dot org
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