Delta and Delft Integraal/Outlook often write about innovative ideas that offer big promises for the future. But what has happened to such ideas a couple years on? What for instance has happened to the Delcraftworks’ flying saucer?
Delft Outlook, March 2007:
Delcraftworks aims to drag the aerospace sector out of the mire and develop an environmentally friendly airplane. For decades, the initiators say, nothing essential has changed in the design of passenger planes.
A plane without tail, which emits no carbon dioxide and flies very quietly. It was with great pride that researchers from TU Delft’s aerospace department, ‘Delcraftworks’, presented their invention, a blended wing aircraft, at Schiphol Airport a few weeks ago, just prior to it taking off for China. The plane did not take off silently however, but rather with the rumbling of a Boeing. What the researchers had presented was a mockup, which was then shipped to Shanghai, where it will be exhibited at the World Exhibition, which runs from May to October.
In 2007, when this department, which focuses its research on innovative, environmentally friendly airplanes, was first started, project leader Meine Oosten stated that the airplane of the future should be tailless, because the tail accounts for much of the air resistance. “Preferably, a plane should be nose-less as well”, he added.
The aerospace department promoted its daring project with ads in newspapers depicting a flying saucer. “That saucer wasn’t such a good idea”, says interim project manager, François Geuskens, in hindsight. “The marketing department used that picture to emphasize that we think out of the box at TU Delft. From the start however we made it clear that our goal was not to make a saucer. Nevertheless, the story took on a spin of its own. It’s clear that a saucer is not the right shape for an efficient plane. In industry we were not taken very seriously.”
By the end of this year, Delcraftworks aims to have a prototype of an unmanned, blended wing airplane up and running with a wing span of almost two meters. “The design of this airplane, called Zesar (Zero Emission Silent Aircraft Realisation), is in a very late stage”, Geuskens confirms. “We have no parts ready yet, but we have ordered the malls.” Geuskens believes that by 2012 he and his colleagues will have built a prototype twice that size.
The first small prototype will run on batteries. The later version will use hydrogen: either by direct hydrogen combustion in special hydrogen jet engines (which still must be developed) or with the intervention of a fuel cell.
The researchers presume that substantial progress will be made in technologies for compact hydrogen storage (the problem with this fuel is the huge amount of space it takes up), because as early as 2015 or 2016 they intend to have a manned airplane ready with a span of around eight meters, which can fly 1500 kilometers at a cruising speed of 400 kilometers per hour.
After the flying saucer misfortune, the hope is that TU Delft will not place any new ads asking for extraterrestrial pilots.
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