Modelling and Designing Cryogenic Hydrogen Tanks for Future Aircraft Applications

Christopher Winnefeld,Thomas Kadyk,Boris Bensmann,Ulrike Krewer,Richard Hanke-Rauschenbach

doi:10.3390/en11010105

Christopher Winnefeld, Thomas Kadyk + Show 3 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/en11010105

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Abstract

In the near future, the challenges to reduce the economic and social dependency on fossil fuels must be faced increasingly. A sustainable and efficient energy supply based on renewable energies enables large-scale applications of electro-fuels for, e.g., the transport sector. The high gravimetric energy density makes liquefied hydrogen a reasonable candidate for energy storage in a light-weight application, such as aviation. Current aircraft structures are designed to accommodate jet fuel and gas turbines allowing a limited retrofitting only. New designs, such as the blended-wing-body, enable a more flexible integration of new storage technologies and energy converters, e.g., cryogenic hydrogen tanks and fuel cells. Against this background, a tank-design model is formulated, which considers geometrical, mechanical and thermal aspects, as well as specific mission profiles while considering a power supply by a fuel cell. This design approach enables the determination of required tank mass and storage density, respectively. A new evaluation value is defined including the vented hydrogen mass throughout the flight enabling more transparent insights on mass shares. Subsequently, a systematic approach in tank partitioning leads to associated compromises regarding the tank weight. The analysis shows that cryogenic hydrogen tanks are highly competitive with kerosene tanks in terms of overall mass, which is further improved by the use of a fuel cell.

Highlights

In future aircraft scenarios, facing challenges to satisfy the global market growth requires new approaches in air transport solutions while simultaneously reducing the environmental impact.Boeing [1] and Airbus [2] predict revenue passenger kilometres to double in less than 20 years.In addition, twice the current fleet is expected to operate until 2036 as well
In contrast to most of the previous studies on hydrogen storage, which discuss a dimensioning on particular aircraft geometries, our approach is a more fundamental one: here, the tank design is evaluated over a wide range of the dimensionless parameters φ, ψ and λ to draw general conclusions on the effect of shapes of tanks
Analysis of the sensitivity of the storage density shows the importance of using specific design missions for tank design and considering the hydrogen mass required for venting

Summary

Introduction

In future aircraft scenarios, facing challenges to satisfy the global market growth requires new approaches in air transport solutions while simultaneously reducing the environmental impact.Boeing [1] and Airbus [2] predict revenue passenger kilometres to double in less than 20 years.In addition, twice the current fleet is expected to operate until 2036 as well. In future aircraft scenarios, facing challenges to satisfy the global market growth requires new approaches in air transport solutions while simultaneously reducing the environmental impact. Boeing [1] and Airbus [2] predict revenue passenger kilometres to double in less than 20 years. Twice the current fleet is expected to operate until 2036 as well. In order to achieve sufficient reduction of overall aviation-related emissions, new propulsion technologies and aircraft designs along with tremendous aerodynamic improvements have to be introduced. In the visionary commitment Flightpath 2050 [3], CO2 emissions should be cut by 75%, NOx emissions by 90% and noise footprint by 60% in 2050 compared to the reference value of the year 2000. Considering a supply by fossil fuel, these goals appear to be far from being achieved

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