And Common Hydrogen is becoming a member of the race this week. The corporate has a take a look at flight deliberate for its Sprint 8-300, a regional plane with over 40 seats.
The foremost purpose is to check out the propulsion system, which is able to use hydrogen gasoline cells that flip hydrogen and oxygen into water vapor, producing electrical energy to energy the airplane.
The plane will fly with hydrogen gasoline cells powering one aspect whereas a standard jet engine runs on the opposite. It’s a regular follow for testing out new programs in flight, says Common Hydrogen CEO and cofounder Paul Eremenko.
Even when the take a look at flight is profitable, there’s an extended street forward earlier than cargo or passengers will climb aboard a hydrogen-powered airplane. That’s as a result of there’s quite a lot of infrastructure round airplanes, and a broad change to hydrogen-powered flight could require rethinking quite a lot of it.
Take fueling, for instance. Business airports right now have a longtime community to gasoline up planes. Jet gasoline is carried in, often on vehicles or in pipelines to a central fueling system. Vehicles can then choose it up and produce it to a airplane because it sits at a gate.
That entire system won’t work so effectively for hydrogen, Eremenko says. Pipelines carrying hydrogen are liable to leak, and maintaining hydrogen in a liquid kind requires cooling it all the way down to cryogenic temperatures, which regularly means there’s quite a lot of loss when transferring it from one container to a different.
The answer, as Eremenko sees it, appears to be like rather a lot like one in every of my prized possessions: a Nespresso espresso maker. Common Hydrogen plans to construct and use pods full of hydrogen gasoline that may be loaded and unloaded from its airplanes, stopping the necessity to switch hydrogen between totally different containers.
The take a look at flight this week gained’t use these pods, for the reason that focus is ensuring the airplane’s propulsion system works as supposed. The Sprint 8-300 that can be flying can be powered utilizing hydrogen tanks crammed up earlier than flight, however future take a look at flights will use the capsule system to check out how that works within the air, Eremenko says.
