Electric aircraft: wings as supercapacitors?

[Paul-R]

The wings of light aircraft are often made out of resin composite materials, layering sheets of fibreglass with resin and more fibreglass, more resin and so on.

How possible would it be to make such wings by layering on top of the structural sheets, further sheets of aluminium foil, then a layer of resin or other dielectric material, followed by more foil and more interweaving layers of foil and dielectric paint, ensuring that each foil layer has an electrical connection drawn to one side before the next layer goes on.

... so you end up with a massive, if somewhat crude cap?

[synchro1]

@Paul-R,

That's a fiendishly clever idea for an electric powered airplane. Aircraft normally need to discharge the excess static electricity from wing tip electrodes.

[Paul-R]

Yours was the breakthrough insight; I merely proposed a capacitor instead of batteries.

What you are referring to is the static bolt that the first person down a rope from a helicopter gets if he or she does not fall the last foot, isn't it? i thought this was because the metal rotors are sweeping through the earth's mag field like a unipolar generator but if a regular wing, presumably metallic, also gets a charge, this is intriguing. I wonder if anyone knows a small manufacturer of gliders which carry a small petrol engine to get them out of trouble - which could be replaced with an electric one) ?

[Nink]

Using a carbon based structure as a super capacitor in a planes wings is a good use case and I am sure we will see model / toy aircraft appear very soon (helicopters  / planes / drones etc).  To make this is fairly simple and sheets of super conductors can be made easily with graphene coated PET or other types of substrates.  There has also been some experiments with 3D printing with graphene so theoretically ( although I have not personally tried it) you could 3D print layers of graphene and substrates creating a superconductor of any shape. 

The entire body, rims, windows, motor etc of a car could also be the super capacitor that powers the car. 

The first area we will see this being used will be on devices like mobile phones. I guarantee some entrepreneur will bring out a super capacitor cell phone case that charges in 20 seconds you can put on your iPhone or android that will slowly discharge and charge your battery throughout the day.

Let's assume this topic is now prior art and covers the broad concept of using the structure of any device and or its associated working and non working components as the actual super capacitor that is used to power or charge the device. This is now published here so no patents can be made that make this claim in future.   I think this topic deserves broad exploration to ensure any art in this space is published preventing any patents from being filed. Patents this broad would stifle inventors and prevent any products being developed in future using this method of having the working and non working components of a device  also being the storage medium to power the device.

NINK