Solar-powered plane flight

The Solar Impulse 2

An interesting item of news related clean technologies and renewable resources (see my last few posts) is that of the plane Solar Impulse 2, which is powered by the sun.

Two Swiss pilots, Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg, are currently underway on a flight around the world using no fuel whatsoever. They started in March 2015 in Abu Dhabi, and plan to end the flight there before the end of 2016.

In June, they completed a record-breaking flight from Nagoya, Japan to Hawaii, USA in 4 days, 21 hours, and 52 minutes. The plane must now remain in Hawaii over the winter in order to repair the batteries, but the pilots hope to finish by summer 2016.

The Solar Impulse website: http://www.solarimpulse.com/

On the website, the progress of the flight is continually updated, and there are both news items and videos relating to various aspects of the flight and the plane itself. Students can not only find out the technological details of the plane, but can also keep track of the project's progress.

There are videos of each pilot relating information about the project. Both videos are less than 3 minutes and are narrated in English (with French accents).

Of particular interest to engineering students is the technical information about how the plane functions.

Diagram from solarimpulse.com

This information is useful for both presentations and written technical descriptions.

Since there are many news articles about the Solar Impulse Project, small groups of students could be assigned different articles to read, and then in class compare and consolidate the technical details, as well as chronological information about the flight path. This can be added to throughout the semester - until the end of the flight next year.

Some useful articles for this purpose:

Solar Impulse's Troubled Round-the-world Flight (from The Guardian)
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jul/27/solar-impulse-round-the-world-flight-raise-20-million-euros 

Meet the Men Flying a Solar-Powered Plane Around the World (from Time website):
http://time.com/4004573/solar-impulse-plane-no-fuel/?xid=newsletter-brief 

Everything You Need to Know About Solar Impulse (also from Time, before the flight started):
http://time.com/3903110/solar-impulse-plane 

Solar-Powered Plane Begins Its Journey Around the World (from Wired website)
http://www.wired.com/2015/03/solar-powered-plane-completes-first-leg-round-world-flight/