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RedditWhen airlines shop for new aircraft, they follow some of the same principles car buyers do: Green is in; gas hogs are out. So airplane manufacturers are studying ways to reduce emissions and make engines less greedy. That’s why Cecilio Barberán was able to fly a powered glider last year with no avgas.
Instead, his HK 36 Super Dimona carried a 200-pound hydrogen fuel cell that ran an electric motor to turn its propeller. The fuel cell couldn’t quite put out the energy required for takeoff—45 kilowatts—and got help from a lithium ion battery to lift off the runway in Ocaña, Spain. At 3,300 feet Barberán disconnected the battery, and for the next 20 minutes the Super Dimona flew straight and level at about 60 mph on just the fuel cell. It was the first time a piloted airplane had flown powered by a fuel cell alone.
“Demonstrations like this lead the way toward using this technology in small manned and unmanned air vehicles,” says Nieves Lapeña. She heads the demonstrator program, run by Boeing Research & Technology Europe, a far-flung clutch of engineers within the company’s advanced projects arm, Phantom Works. Ordinarily the glider flies with an 80-horsepower Rotax engine. According to Lapeña, the hydrogen fuel cell-electric motor combination used only 28 percent of the energy that the internal combustion engine would have used on a similar flight.
Fuel cells could increase the range of small UAVs now operating on battery power, according to Lapeña. Both batteries and fuel cells deliver electrical power from a chemical reaction, but the battery quits when its stored reactants are used up; a fuel cell continues to work as long as its external fuel supply lasts.
Boeing studies fuel cells because they could also eventually increase the efficiency of airliner engines. Today, a fraction of the power from the engines is diverted to generators that run onboard lighting and other systems. In the future, fuel cells could provide that energy. According to Bill Glover, managing director for environmental strategy at Boeing Commercial Airplanes, relieving the engines of the burden of running generators would save only a small percentage of an airliner’s fuel. But multiply even a tiny fuel savings by the tens of thousands of flights a major airline makes a year: That’s a lot of gas.
For the demonstration flight, the Boeing group used a type of fuel cell called a polymer electrolyte membrane, also known as a proton exchange membrane (PEM). It contains stacks of electrolytes sandwiched between conductive surfaces of opposing charges. Hydrogen protons pass through the membranes, but electrons travel around them. The flow of electrons generates a current to run the engine. The hydrogen protons that have traveled across the membrane recombine with electrons and oxygen from the air to produce water, which can be used aboard an airliner.
PEMs have been around a long time; they were originally developed for NASA’s Gemini program. “The technology has improved tremendously since then,” says Mark Hoberecht, fuel cell manager at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Ohio. Because of advances in materials used as catalysts in the cells’ chemical reactions, cells produce more electrical power with less waste heat, Hoberecht explains. The efficiency could be improved further if operating temperatures could be increased. Current PEMs are limited to temperatures around 180 degrees Fahrenheit. “A lot of the automobile companies are investigating more advanced membranes that would allow the cells to operate at higher temperatures,” Hoberecht says.
The PEM has drawn the interest of the aerospace industry because it’s portable and can tolerate the expansion and contraction of on-off cycles. It’s also simple—no moving parts—and silent.
Comments
Folks: I have tried to get funding for a "Free Energy" power unit that would run the airplane without the fuel cells or batteries. Of course most of the funding went to the usual players. Let me know if anyone is interested and I'll explane how it works. Inventor.
Posted by Robert Bryant on January 22,2009 | 02:58PM
This is really interesting. It's defenitly the future in aviation. But this technology is for props only right? Will apply for propulsion engines?
Posted by Angel Medina on March 1,2009 | 11:34PM