Dumb question, could this combined with the power from the regular engine give you thrust greater than the weight of your plane and potentially allow vertical take off and landing (imagine the nose pointed up, And obviously you'd need special landing legs, etc)
There are no dumb questions, but if you were a pilot, this would certainly be a dumb thing to try.
1. in light planes, "the weight of the plane" is a little more complicated, since fuel can increase the weight of your plane by, like, 40% or so. We're talking, like, 500 pounds of fuel on a 1600 pound plane.
2. a helicopter has a very complex mechanism to give it control based on propellor movement. an airplane trying to hover without these mechanisms would be essentially uncontrolled. it would almost certainly spin like a top.
3. this specific electric boost engine claims to add 40 horsepower. a cessna 172 has 180 horsepower. So, not a shocking improvement.
RC Planes have ridiculously high power to weight ratios which are unrealistic by full scale standards. They use small bursts of near full throttle power to move air across the (oversized) flight control surfaces. Full size planes just torque roll uncontrollably when they get near zero airspeed. Although with a giant engine and propeller and some gigantic control surfaces who knows.
Thanks, makes sense for this case. I'm still wondering though, say for a purely electric plane designed for this type of VTOL from the ground up, is it workable?
Couldn't the large area of the wings counteract the counter rotation or at decrease it to an acceptable level?
> say for a purely electric plane designed for this type of VTOL from the ground up, is it workable
Sure, toys can do it. That's what all these commercial drones are doing. But there's an irritating inverse square law that says the power required to hover goes up shockingly fast when you start to increase the weight.
Also, there's a reason commercial airlines don't use electric engines and batteries; the power-to-weight ratio for a gasoline engine far exceeds that of an electric+battery solution.
I'd at least design a vtol aircraft with 2 props to not get the axial roll torque of the single engine aircraft.
Any plane with thrust-to-weight >1 can fly vertically, but flying vertically and taking off vertically are two entirely different things. For example, the ability to convert engine shaft horsepower to usable thrust is very poor at zero airspeed. The V-22 osprey shows that it's both possible and difficult to take off vertically with propellers.
Yes. They state this in the abstract: "We maximize the capacity of the battery in generating movement with the electric engine, and we have found that we can also use the system as a hybrid for light aircraft: the pilot can activate it when she wants, adding up to 40 horsepower for take-offs or whatever is needed."
