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Moller's Driven … To Fly - Moller Sky Car prototype

Automotive Design & Production, Oct, 2001 by Christopher A. Sawyer

Dr. Paul Moller's sky car promises to end airport congestion, reduce travel time, and make gridlock a thing of the past. Crazy at it may seem, it may do just that--and forever change the role and design of the automobile.

"There's no way we're ever going to build enough new freeway miles to handle all of the growth, so there's got to be an answer here."

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This isn't a quote from some telematics guru outlining the need for car-to-car and car-to-infrastructure communication. Here's another clue. "A highway is a string. It is a one-dimensional world. The three-dimensional world lets you address gridlock if the dimensions and vehicles are integrated. If they are, you can put all of the vehicles currently on the face of the earth in the sky at the same time and they'd be miles apart." Intrigued? You should be. If Dr. Paul Moller, president, CEO and chairman of the board of Moller International (Davis, California) has his way, at some point in the future the infrastructure will exist to allow thousands, if not millions, of his Sky Cars to shuttle people from door-to-door on trips up to 900 miles, at speeds approaching 400 miles per hour.

Looking like something George Jetson would fly to his home in the Skypad Apartments, the Moller Sky Car prototype has four sizeable engine nacelles, a large rear wing, and a clear bubble-top canopy. It takes off and lands vertically, and transitions to level flight automatically. Unlike Jetson's machine, there is no need for human intervention--ever. Sky Car follows an electronic "highway in the sky" that is claimed to keep it at a sale distance from every other airborne vehicle, and unerringly guide it through bad weather and around obstacles like mountains.

Moller envisions that Sky Cars will be on-call as part of an "Air Taxi" service rather than privately owned. Customers will call a dispatcher, wait for the unmanned Sky Car to arrive, load up, and leave for their destination. Different Sky Cars will be used for different passenger loads, from a single-passenger version up to a six-passenger vehicle.

ROTARY CLUB MEMBER

Central to the Sky Car concept is the rotary engine. "Quite frankly, if the rotary engine had never been invented," says Moller, "the Sky Car would not be a practical vehicle. A Wankel engine has most of the attributes of a turbine engine at one-tenth to one one-hundredth of the cost."

Cost is important to the Sky Car equation for two reasons. First, the Sky Car uses not one but eight two-rotor engines--two mounted back-to-back in each nacelle driving counter-rotating propellers-for balanced lift and to provide powertrain redundancy. Second, Moller International's analysis shows that most every form of transportation is priced at five times the cost of the powerplant. So, if he is to reach the $60,000 to $80,000 selling price he envisions (based on sales of 100,000 vehicles per year), the powerplant must be simple, relatively low-cost, and efficient.

"In today's dollars," he begins, "we've spent close to $70 million over the past 30 to 40 years just on the engine, which evolved from OMC's (Outboard Marine Corporation's) snowmobile design. Each engine has just three moving parts, two rotors and crankshaft. It's quite simple, which is a good thing when you're talking about aircraft propulsion systems."

"The rotary presents a very small surface area to the air," he continues, "so we can hide it behind the spinner in the center of the duct. Our design doesn't use oil to cool the bearings. We use air, which means we don't have to carry around as much oil or the plumbing for oil coolers. This also means our internal surface temperatures are higher because the rotors are air-cooled."

Higher surface temperatures were not something Moller's engineers desired. They caused an enormous amount of research into lubricants that work under hot conditions and had the side-effect of promoting more complete combustion. The combustion chamber environment is very air-rich and the rotors have a lot of overlap to promote exhaust gas recirculation. But the development won't stop here, even though the California Air Resources Board (CARB) says the Freedom rotary is surprisingly clean when running on gasoline. "We are moving toward stratified charge in our future designs," says Moller, "for even greater power and efficiency."

The reason is simple: It takes a great deal of thrust for vertical takeoffs and landings. Moller claims the current Freedom engine has an installed stall-horsepower of 1.5 hp/lb., though it can produce double that if needed in an emergency situation. This means each of Sky Car's eight engines produces about 150 hp. "For vehicle use," says Moller, "Mazda's rotary engine makes much more sense. Cars spend most of their time at idle or in transient situations. Our engine typically operates at 60% to 70% power, or not at all. So I can do a lot of design simplification because of these operating characteristics."

SIMPLICITY, SIMPLICITY, SIMPLICITY

Simplicity extends to the rest of Moller's vehicle as well. There's no V-22 Osprey-like rotating wing assembly, just four nacelles with computer- controlled rotating vanes to direct the thrust either down or back. The wings are sized for cruising speed, smaller than they would be if Sky Car had to take off and land conventionally. "Our tail creates about 35% of the total lift," says Moller, "whereas the tail on a normal aircraft exerts a downward force on the plane to stabilize it." A recent study conducted by Boeing concluded that 75% of Sky Car's total lift comes from the shape of the nacelles and body, an amount said to be "more than adequate". (See www.skyaid.org/Skycar/overview2001ALL.htm for more information from the Boeing study.)

Automotive Industry

Moller's Driven … To Fly - Moller Sky Car prototype

Automotive Design & Production, Oct, 2001 by Christopher A. Sawyer

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