Impact of hydrogen fueled hypersonic airliners on the O3 layer depletion

Abstract

The promising opportunity to reach intercontinental long distances in a few hours is a remarkable issue for both private companies and public organizations: teams of scientists, technicians and researchers in Europe, USA, China, Russia and India are working at national and international programs on long range high speed civil transport. The Space X's CEO also announced, at the IAC 2017 conference, the growing interest in developing a 30-min transatlantic passenger flight by means of a 2-stage rocket-based vehicle. Meeting the dwell requirement of antipodal ranges and high speeds is realistic through a new era of hydrogen-fuelled hypersonic airbreathing vehicles. The interest in hydrogen as aviation fuel has recently increased not only due to the growth of worldwide air travel and time reduction requirements, also for the dramatic rise of common aviation fuel prices, and the continuously increasing restrictive environmental issues.In the light of these changes that have occurred in fuel prices, emissions reduction imperatives and the currently higher demand for supersonic airline travels, hydrogen-fuelled hypersonic airbreathing airliners are a valuable chance with respect to other means of transport (i.e., a rocked based passenger transport). In fact, hydrogen is one of the most environmental friendly fuels, since no particulate and carbon oxide emissions are produced. Past objections on hydrogen as fuel for civil transport, such as safety, liquefying and storing hydrogen are now overcame and its technological maturity opens a large worldwide market for hydrogen as “green” fuel. However, since the opportunity for hydrogen as fuel for future fleets of airline transport resides in its “green” peculiarity, the investigation of the impact of the H2/air hot exhausts on the ozone layer depletion is mandatory. In fact, a lot of hypersonic cruise vehicles fly at an altitude of 25000–30000 m that corresponds to the ozonosphere. In this region, the concentration of ozone is maximum and NOx emissions may catalyse the ozone destruction.In this context, the goal of this paper is to estimate the effect of the H2/air emissions (i.e., nitrogen oxides, hydroxide and water vapor) of a fleet of 200 hydrogen fuelled hypersonic airliners flying once a day for 360 days from Brussels to Sydney, on the ozone layer and on the global temperature increase.