Researchers at the University of Illinois are working on an all-electric aircraft project funded by NASA.
The aviation industry, only born a little over a century ago, is on the brink of an enormous change. While electric cars and the electric scooters are already dotting city streets, planes are preparing to join the emissions-free club.
Experts are drawing up plans for hydrogen-powered passenger planes in an attempt to clean up aircraft emissions. The engineers have been given three years and $6million (£4.6million) to create the tech which could revolutionise the aviation industry.
By using cooled, condensed liquid hydrogen instead of hydrogen gas, clean power can be generated without needing heavy pressurised storage tanks.
There is an increasing need to reduce the aviation industry’s carbon emissions, especially since it has been forecast that air travel in the United States alone is expected to increase 90% within the next two decades. This increase will boost greenhouse gas emissions from hydrocarbon fuels even more.
The NASA-funded project is being led by aerospace engineer Phillip Ansell, electrical engineer Kiruba Haran and colleagues at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in the US.
This new electric and cryogenic liquid hydrogen aircraft program is called CHEETA (the Center for Cryogenic High-Efficiency Electrical Technologies for Aircraft).
'Essentially, the program focuses on the development of a fully electric aircraft platform that uses cryogenic liquid hydrogen as an energy storage method,' said Professor Ansell.
'The hydrogen chemical energy is converted to electrical energy through a series of fuel cells, which drive the ultra-efficient electric propulsion system,' he added.
However, hydrogen cells on their own may be able to power trains or turbines but they lack the ability to power a jet engine without weighing it down because they take up a lot of space.
Luckily, the University of Illinois researchers working on the project have found a way to cryogenically cool hydrogen cells so they can be condensed into a liquid and used as fuel.
When this hydrogen liquid is mixed with oxygen in the engine there is a powerful reaction, which results in a lot of energy that can be converted into electricity to drive an electric propulsion system.
"The low temperature requirements of the hydrogen system also provide opportunities to use superconducting, or lossless, energy transmission and high-power motor systems." said Ansell.
The CHEETA project aims to bridge this gap to pave the way for the creation of fully electric airliners in the future.