Hydrogen for sustainable aviation and shipping

Theme lead: Prof. dr. Arvind Gangoli Rao

Main challenges:

  • Novel propulsion systems on hydrogen or hydrogen based fuels
  • Low NOx hydrogen combustion for existing engines.
  • High power density fuel cells for aviation and shipping.
  • On-board storage and management of Hydrogen (carriers).

Ambitions / contributions:

Hydrogen and hydrogen-based fuels provide us with an opportunity to overhaul our transportation system, especially the hard to abate sectors such as shipping and aviation.  At the same time it raises several challenges, right from production, logistics, storage, usage, emissions, and climate impact.  

Fuel Flexible Hydrogen Engine: The aim is to design and modify propulsion and power systems such that they can be used with hydrogen when required.

Low NOx Hydrogen Combustion: Hydrogen combustion does tends to produce higher amount of NOx emissions due to its higher adiabatic flame temperature and therefore research into low NOx combustion for aero gas turbines systems and ship engines is of importance.

Hydrogen Fuel Cells: Fuel cells are an efficient and emission free means of converting hydrogen into electricity and subsequently into  power. High power density PEM and SOFC type of fuel cells and their associated subsystem are being developed for aviation and shipping.

Hydrogen Storage: The volume requirement of hydrogen is between 4 to 8 times more than that of traditional hydrocarbon fuels.  We aim to tackle this challenge by developing free form light weight composite LH2 and pressurized H2 tanks.

Hydrogen Carriers: Pure hydrogen can be carried in gas or liquid which require very high pressures or extremely low temperatures.  Alternately, hydrogen can also be carried in the form of chemical compounds (like NH3), metal hydrides, liquid organic hydrogen carriers, etc. The suitability of these types depends on the application.

Background:

  • Expertise includes: Flight performance & propulsion, Aircraft Noise and Climate Effects, Air Transport & Operations, Aerospace structures & computational mechanics, Ship Hydromechanics, Ship Design, Production & Operation.
  • Main research infrastructure: clean combustion lab, flying LH2 demonstrators (AeroDelft), various wind tunnels, gas turbine, fuel cell system integration lab,  regeneration research of circular hydrogen carriers and to hydrogen storage research facilities for hydrogen sloshing, hydrogen embrittlement and graphene structures.