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Around the world with a solar airplane
Solvay is Solar Impulse's Main Partner and Technlology Partner, contributing to the project with technical support and its recognized competence in material development and applications. To know more about the zero fuel plane please visit our corporate website.
Some of Solvay Chemicals products are on board the first solar airplane:
- F1EC: High Performance Electrolyte Additive F1EC for Lithium Batteries
Monofluorethylene carbonate, commonly called “F1EC” or “FEC”, is a new additive for the battery electrolyte in rechargeable lithium ion batteries. Depending on the specific application it can represent up to 20% to the electrolyte blend. FEC is currently commercialized by Solvay Fluor.
Compared to the widely used Vinylene Carbonate (VC), the main advantages of the new F1EC are:
- a more flexible film (solid-electrolyte interphase, SEI) on the anode in lithium ion cells.
- better overall performance, higher capacity and improved calendar life of secondary lithium batteries, and improved safety.
- Solkane® 365 mfc Blowing Agent for High Insulating Polyurethane Foams
The cockpit of the SI airplane must vitally be lightweight, but stable and still providing optimal insulating values against the freezing outside temperatures high up in the air. Lightweight but still stable construction can be provided by using polyurethane foams, which are produced basically from a polyol, an isocyanate and a foam expansion agent, also called blowing agent (“BA”) Solvay Fluor’s 3rd generation blowing agent, Solkane® 365, offers the best gas phase lambda (thermal conductivity) value in its class. Combined with its very low diffusion factors this results in excellent polyurethane foams with challenging properties:
- Best foam insulation values
- Best foam dimensional stability
- Best foam compressive strength
- Best moisture resistance
All of those factors together influence the foam properties and are and provide the excellent performance characteristic of light butweight but high insulation polyurethane foam which forms the basis for the SI cockpit, the 4 motor gondolas as well as the wing tips. A special original “Solvay solution” was developed for producing these important pieces: foaming big blocks of foam and thereafter machining the “eggshell” parts or wing tips out of them.
- Wingtips: Solkane® 365 mfc Blowing Agent for High Performance Polyurethane structural Foams
The wingtips have been machined out of the foam blocks produced originally for the cockpit and for the motor gondolas.
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