The flight trip produces around 2.5% of all global CO2 emissions, and despite decades of effort in developing alternative fuels or more efficient aircraft constructions, this number has not moved much. NASA, including the Aviation Management of the US aviation, has always tried to build a more sustainable future for air travel. You recently supported another step in this direction by based Phillip Ansell from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign an Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) to develop an aircraft engine based on hydrogen.
The scholarship focuses on the development of hydrogen hybrid performance for sustainable systems (HY2PAS), a hybrid engine that uses a fuel cell and a gas turbine to supply an airplane with electricity. Hybrid systems have been tried out beforehand, but the secret sauce of Hy2 Pass is the use of draft.
In hybrid aircraft systems there is typically a fuel cell and a gas turbine. The fuel cell takes hydrogen as an input and generates electrical energy as an output. In a typical hybrid system, this electrical energy would supply a compressor with electricity, the output of which was linked directly to the rotation of the turbine. In Hy2 Pass, however, the compressor itself is decoupled by the turbine, even though it still supplies it oxygen. It then also supplies oxygen to the cathode of fuel cells, which enables its continued operation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ua7mybury
AI generated video on the Hy2 Pass system.
This method has some advantages, but the most important is the dramatic increase in efficiency that it allows. The waste heat generated in this mechanical connection is removed directly from the turbine by decoupling the compressor. In addition, the compressor can be carried out at different pressures so that an algorithm optimizes its speed and at the same time ignores the required speed of the turbine.
In addition, emissions from the entire system are essentially only water. This hybrid system effectively eliminates the emissions of this type of hybrid engine overall. At least theoretically, this type of drive system would be the Holy Grail, which NASA and the rest of the aviation industry have been looking for for years.
It is still a long way to make this system a reality. The scholarship of the phase -i -niac will concentrate on proving the concept of the system. It is important that it also requires an understanding of another aircraft system and the “optimization of mission suro” in order to minimize the energy requirement of a future application for the system. It sounds as if there were some restrictions on how the system could be used in practice, even though I start a reasonable application as part of the phase.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I02KD5NXCDG
Interview with Dr. ANSELL, the PI via the Hy2 Pass project.
If the project is successful and Dr. ANSELL's success story that consistently reach NASA design goals appears a good bet. It is possible that one day a hydrogen aircraft could be in the air again. And this time it will be an important player to eliminate emissions from one of the most important industries in the world.
Learn more:
NASA – hydrogen hybrid performance for sustainable aviation systems (HY2PAS)
Ut – multimode drive could revolutionize how we start things in space
Ut – reaction engines go bankrupt and take the hypersonal saber engine with you
UT – NASA works on electrical aircraft
Lead picture:
Artist concept of the Hy2 Pass engine
Credit – NASA / Phillip Ansell
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