Coventry University helping develop future carbon-zero aircraft technology

Hydrogen fuel cells represent a gold standard for zero-emission aircraft propulsion. Alternatives like sustainable aviation fuels and hydrogen combustion still produce polluting emissions but the only by-product from a fuel cell is water vapour.

Most of the technology development around hydrogen fuel cells to date has focused on automotive applications in cars and heavy vehicles like buses. The requirements in terms of safety, reliability and power are understandably much higher in aerospace, and for a fuel cell to compete with a jet engine, it must be very power-dense and impeccably reliable.

Our role is to develop technologies to monitor the health of the fuel cells. At present this is done in quite a basic way; typically by simply measuring the voltage of each cell in the stack. This requires hundreds or even thousands of electrical connections, each of which is a potential failure point, particularly in an aircraft that is susceptible to vibrations and temperature changes. In HEIGHTS we’re developing an approach that we’ve applied previously to Li-ion batteries, which integrates sensors into the cells themselves with no external connections, enabling us to improve reliability and diagnostics.

It’s important that we work to accelerate the adoption of hydrogen fuel cell technology in aviation, as there simply aren’t any viable alternatives for truly zero-emission, long-distance flight.

Dr Oliver Curnick, Professor of Electrochemical Engineering at Coventry University’s Research Centre for E-Mobility and Clean Growth

This is about getting hydrogen-powered aircraft in the air, and into service at scale, as quickly as possible. We firmly believe that hydrogen will be the primary energy source for flight, initially for smaller aircraft but eventually in the longer term for everything that flies.

David Woolhouse, CEO of Intelligent Energy

Hydrogen as a fuel source is an essential part of the ATI’s technology roadmaps for future power and propulsion systems. We are delighted to be supporting Intelligent Energy’s HEIGHTS programme, which builds upon its prior expertise in fuel cell development to encompass novel means of addressing thermal management challenges associated with aircraft integration.

Jacqueline Castle, Chief Technology Officer at the Aerospace Technology Institute