Electric Paramotor Resources

This new feature will become a compendium of information for developers. Any developer willing to share information will be greatly appreciated by the others and the hordes of hopeful pilots.

If you have a resource that might be valuable to the developer community or electric paramotor enthusiast, please send it to us at the Contact address. Thanks!

Electric Aircraft

2009-Jan-10 We can only hope that this idea eventually works: using solar power on the wing to extend flight time, maybe even keep us aloft. Although the technology is a long, long way off, paraglider improvements and solar generating efficiency improvements narrow the gap (more of a gulf at the moment).

Thanks to Thierry Siereveld for the following.

http://www.daystartech.com/cigs-foil.cfm

http://www.usa.siemens.com

Electric Aircraft

2009-Jan-10 Randy Bollinger sent us this information on some new electric motors (1.2 Mb PDF) that show promise.

Electric Aircraft

2007-12-18 Gerald Farrell sent us information on the AE-1 Silent, Electric sailplane. Their application is merely for self launch but that suits a lot of PPG pilots, too. What's surprising is that this German-built sailplane started in 1998.

A flying hang glider trike has been built. See it at www.ElectraFlyer.com. This is too heavy for footluanched PPG but is a good start. Hang glider trikes, even though they fly faster, require less power per pound due to their relative aerodynamic cleanliness.

Electric Motors & Drives

2007-Aug-30 Manuel Planchart has suggested this source for brushless electric motors: a2tech.eu.

2008-Mar-21 Warner Eck has provided lots of information on electric drives for several applications of electric propulsion including paramotors and hang gliders. He also suggests several websites in his article.

Batteries

2007-12-26 Gerald Farrell, Mike MacPhereson Stanford University Scientists have devised a way to increase the capacity of Lithium Ion batteries by 10 fold. More importantly it's been done using a process that should be reasonably easy to manufacture—a promising battery technology that hopefully somebody can bring to market.

2007-12-18 Keith Pickersgill tells us about a promising battery technology that may eventually pay huge performance dividents. Check out petrol-head.com and PureGreenCars.com.

2007-12-08 Flytown Power Company is courting electric PPG hopefulls with battery backs suited to their application. They want to serve the PPG and lightplane communities as a special manufacturer of high rate lithium polymer (lipo) battery in sizes from 20C/30C to 4800mAh

www.flytown-batt.com is willing to special produce batteries but their line mainly includes:

1. high rate lipo battery, 10C/18C, 15C/25C, 20C/30C, 25C/30C... capacity could be 4800mah or higher. They'll pack them according to builders' needs. For example, 4S1P, 4S2P, 4S3P, ... 5S1P, 5S2P...6S1P,6S2P... even 10S10P is ok.
2. intelligent charger for lipo battery with a balancing function,
3. Accessories (all kinds of connectors)

For more information, contact Rainy Lee at Flytown Power Co., Ltd. Fax:86-760-855-7569

2007-03-16. Mike Crawford has suggested these resources for improved energy density at affordable prices: everspring.net. He tells us their prices are impressively low, nearly in line with gel-cell batteries. He hasn't purchased from them but is considering doing so for a boat application. They claim to be providing batteries for a Citroen model: http://www.everspring.net/product-battery-customerreference.htm

Comments:

Most of our technology will come from other sources. This will be maintained as a reference for those developing or shopping (eventually) for electric powered paragliding capability.