Largest plane yet tested with hydrogen-powered engine

Aerospace firm ZeroAvia efficiently examined utilizing a hydrogen-electric engine to energy one of many propellors in a 19-seat plane

By Jeremy Hsu

A aircraft with an experimental hydrogen-electric engine on its left wing efficiently accomplished a take a look at flight this week. It is the biggest such craft to be powered with the assistance of a hydrogen engine but.

The UK and US-based firm ZeroAvia performed a 10-minute take a look at flight utilizing an engine that converts hydrogen gas into electrical energy to energy one of many aircraft’s two propellers. ZeroAvia goals to allow industrial flights powered solely by hydrogen gas cells by 2025.

“When people see that we can do a zero-emission flight with a clean fuel that we can create in so many places, wherever there’s electricity and water, that changes people’s minds about things,” says Jacob Leachman at Washington State University.

The demonstration at Cotswold Airport in Gloucestershire, UK, additionally marked the primary flight for the 19-seat Dornier 228 plane that had been transformed right into a take a look at plane. It is a considerably bigger plane than the six-seat Piper Malibu that ZeroAvia has been utilizing for testing the hydrogen-electric engine since 2020.

If all goes properly with subsequent exams, ZeroAvia goals to submit the hydrogen-electric engine for regulatory certification in 2023. That may additionally pave the way in which for a bigger engine appropriate for 90-seat plane.

“There have been tests of hydrogen fuel cell-based aircraft at smaller scale, and anytime we get to demonstrate larger power levels in bigger aircraft, we learn,” says Kiruba Haran on the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

The aviation start-up already has funding from American Airlines together with an settlement for the potential for ordering as much as 100 hydrogen-electric engines sooner or later.

Airbus, one of many two largest plane producers on the planet, additionally beforehand introduced plans to make use of hydrogen gas in growing the primary zero-emission industrial plane by 2035. But Airbus has acknowledged that the majority industrial airliners would nonetheless use fuel turbine engines till at the least 2050.

Moving industrial aviation towards really zero-emission flights would require rather more than simply exchanging conventional jet gas for hydrogen gas. The manufacturing of hydrogen gas additionally requires electrical energy that will nonetheless come from an influence grid operating on fossil fuels – though researchers are trying into methods of producing hydrogen extra cleanly in high-enough portions for powering fleets of plane.

“When you really look at trying to go to sustainable hydrogen-based aviation, you have to figure out how you’re going to get the hydrogen at scale,” says John Hansman on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “And we’re talking a lot of hydrogen.”