Speaker
Description
In order to reach the goal of 50% reduction of emissions by 2050 set by civil aviation industry bodies, the exploration of new and potentially disruptive technologies has become more and more crucial for Airbus in the last few years.
Aircraft electrification, identified as a major pillar of the de-carbonization strategy, while presenting major technological challenges, will also open new and interesting opportunities for optimized architectures in terms of simplification and efficiency.
As explored during the ASCEND project [1], liquid hydrogen stored on board to be converted into electricity in the fuel cells of future low emission aircrafts, enables the possibility to design and operate the powertrain components at cryogenic temperature and possibly to replace conventional conductor materials with superconductors. This would lead to substantial improvements in terms of global aircraft efficiency and weight, but also open new design space thanks to the high current density typical of the superconducting technology.
Each component of a future Megawatt scale powertrain will have different cryogenic cooling requirements, in terms of operating temperature, heat losses and temperature uniformity. For example, the superconducting electrical motor would typically have heat losses of few thousands of Watts in the temperature range of 40/50K and the Motor Control Unit would typically feature some tens of kiloWatt of dissipation in the temperature range of 100/150 K with temperature uniformity between different components to be kept within few degrees. The superconducting DC distribution would be operated below 77 K and the heat losses would be on the order of hundreds of Watt at the interface of the current leads.
In order to allow the operation of such a future MW scale powertrain, one of the major challenges is the development of an efficient cryogenic cooling system able to maintain the components at their working temperature by optimizing the requirement in terms of liquid hydrogen, possibly not exceeding the amount needed by the fuel cells in each phase of the flight mission, including the transients[2].
Additionally, the cryogenic cooling system shall also meet the needs typical of the aircraft industry in terms of weight, space, installation and maintainability constraints, but also to take into account safety and reliability standards. In this work we present the progress in the design of the cryogenic cooling system for a future aircraft Megawatt scale powertrain.
[1] L. Ybanez et al., "ASCEND: The first step towards cryogenic electric propulsion", Proc. IOP Conf. Ser.: Materials Sci. Eng., vol. 1241, 2022.
[2] L. Ybanez et al., “Cryogenic electric propulsion system: ASCEND main results and perspectives”, Conference: MEA2024
| Submitters Country | france |
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