Hydrogen Fueled Aircraft Engines
2022-26-1156
05/26/2022
- Event
- Content
- In the recent years, the climate change has become more devastating, and its continuing use of fossil fuels seems unreasonable as humankind is being pushed into a corner where the need to choose an alternative fuel has become necessary. The two main alternatives currently available are: Electrical propulsion and Hydrogen injected air breathing engines. Electrical propulsion had come far since last 10 years with Li+ ion technology, but the problem with them persists. They provide a low power to weight ratio which reduces the range as well as the load while operating the aircraft. On the other hand, Hydrogen with fuel cells or H2-O2 combustion has a high power to weight ratio but very difficult to handle. So, using hydrogen comes with a lot of difficulties in the present scenario. However. the concept of hydrogen has come a long way since its first use as a Rocket fuel. But this alternate fuel provides many advantages as well as challenges which needs to be overcome to move on its use in aircraft. Even in the process of storing the hydrogen fuel, there has been a new discovery where the use hybrid compounds to store hydrogen at cryogenic temperature reduces the weight of the tank. Looking over all at these recent developments, a few mechanical upgrades which can bring about a much more efficient combustion with an alternate green hydrogen fuel. This can be done by upgrading the combustion chamber in the current turbo fan engine which is widely used in most aircraft engines. Moreover, this method can also turn our existing engines into hydrogen fueled engines, which is million times more efficient than completely changing the engine, which is the only current prospect in the industry and make less NOx emissions as well as the carbon emissions.
- Citation
- Sri, R., and Sivamani, S., "Hydrogen Fueled Aircraft Engines," SAE Technical Paper 2022-26-1156, 2022, .