The Promise, The Propositions and The Problems
Our environment is bleeding, ATF costs are rising, oil reserves are depleting and air-traffic is exploding. That just about sums up the fragile situation of our air-transportation system. There is, thus, a need to explore and research alternative fuels for aircraft systems and while there are many being considered, this work deals with Hydrogen as a fuel for our future aircraft.
Liquid hydrogen as a fuel has already been successfully demonstrated in a number of prototype vehicles by both Eastern and Western carmakers. So the precedents are already available for aviation scientists. Although, as any aircraft designer knows, small issues become huge when a system becomes airborne. The issues research endeavours such as our own face are a severely cramped weight-budget, safety issues with Hydrogen (LH2) storage, fueling and defueling, airborne reliability of the Fuel Cell powerplant, cooling systems and their effectiveness and finally – for all this seemingly complex paraphernalia to come together and work in harmony to make the aircraft fly.
Our research initiative will explore the above mentioned areas of concern as applied to our own 4-Seater PEM Fuel Cell Powered Aircraft that we are developing in collaboration with the University of Petroleum and Energy Studies, Dehradun, India. On this website we will try and explain the challenges we are facing, the future as we see it and the need for like-minded researchers and scientists to work together on this and similar technologies. We believe that this consortium that we are putting together will help researchers around the country and the world collaborate to bring about a future that we are all waiting for…