Solar powered paramotoring a real possibility?
Those who know me will be able to tell you that I have a keen interest in air sports including microlights, sky diving and power kites. As you can imagine paramotoring and paragliding have also caught my eye although as yet, I am completely unable to afford to participate in these sports.
Actually, with the exception of flying my Blade III down the local field, most of these things are somewhat out of reach at the moment due to my financial circumstances.
I have logged nearly 60 hours on a microlight and completed around 25 parachute jumps, some of these with a few seconds of free-fall. All of these activities are fun and with the exception of power kiting, where you don’t get to leave the ground for more than a few seconds at a time, are prohibitively expensive. This is precisely why paramotoring and paragliding has gained my attention.
Paragliding has more specific requirements in that you need a hill or at the very least a reasonable slope to get airborne. Paramotoring (often called powered paragliding) is what really interests me though. You can basically take off from any small suitable piece of land, a farmers field for example (with permission of course), and then land practically anywhere as you don’t need much of a runway at all. It’s currently one of the most accessible forms of powered aviation with full training and you’re own equipment for around £3,000 - £5,000. There are currently no licensing requirements for foot launched paramotors, however professional training is of course highly advisable. Running costs for these machines and associated equipment is also very low and there’s no need to fork out for expensive hangar space or find a lockup for you’re aircraft. A small amount of space in the spare room, shed or garage will do just fine (as long as it’s dry and clean!).
Electric aviation is something that also very much interests me. In the last few years a great deal of progress has been made in this area, partly due to advances in battery technology. This has perhaps been driven by mobile computing and mobile phones, but the resulting benefits for other applications are obvious. In actual fact solar-electric aviation is already a reality and QinetiQ’s Zephyr has recently set a duration record for a solar-electric aircraft having flown for over 336 hours. For a heavier than air craft (not a weather balloon!) to sustain flight for two weeks powered only by the sun is quite an amazing feat don’t you think?
As it happens, electric paramotoring is already here albeit mainly in the form of prototypes and test rigs. I believe at the time of writing there are one or two commercially available paramotors, however flight times are pretty low. As I’m sure you can imagine it a lot of juice to get a man, a motor and a stack of batteries (despite recent advances) off the ground and into the air. 20-30 minutes is a a nice little jolly and I’m sure this will steadily improve. Technically speaking, you could solar charge those batteries and then fly. That would in effect be solar powered paramotoring would it not? This wasn’t quite what I had in mind though.
Another breakthrough technology in the shape of organic photovoltaic cells made using Graphene. Whilst currently these cells are nowhere near as efficient as traditional silicon based solar cells, the manufacturing process could potentially be much cheaper and the physical characteristics of these solar cells means that “printing” them on fabric is a very real possibility - one day. When you consider that the wing area of a paraglider can be from 19 to 27 square meters (don’t quote me on that, it’s based on information available), you can imagine the potential to harness the sun’s energy. Covering the top surface of a paraglider wing with solar solar cells and still retaining all the properties of the wing is perhaps a step too far for the technology at the moment, but one day it might just be possible.
The idea of powering human flight using purely the sunlight is perhaps a bit ambitious. Perhaps it should be done in small steps. Get the battery technology up to scratch first and make solar panels more efficient. Flying for at least an hour on battery power alone would be more than acceptable. Later on perhaps the batteries could be topped up a little with solar cells on the wing. Then finally we could aim for take off on batteries whilst flight is maintained on solar power alone. At the moment all this is more dream than reality, but you know, dreams sometimes can come true.
