The eleventh Breakthrough Expertise of 2023 takes flight

And Common Hydrogen is becoming a member of the race this week. The corporate has a check flight deliberate for its Sprint 8-300, a regional plane with over 40 seats. 

The most important objective is to check out the propulsion system, which can use hydrogen gasoline cells that flip hydrogen and oxygen into water vapor, producing electrical energy to energy the aircraft. 

The plane will fly with hydrogen gasoline cells powering one aspect whereas a conventional jet engine runs on the opposite. It’s a typical apply for testing out new programs in flight, says Common Hydrogen CEO and cofounder Paul Eremenko. 

Even when the check flight is profitable, there’s an extended street forward earlier than cargo or passengers will climb aboard a hydrogen-powered aircraft. That’s as a result of there’s plenty of infrastructure round airplanes, and a broad change to hydrogen-powered flight could require rethinking plenty of it.

Take fueling, for instance. Business airports as we speak have a longtime community to gasoline up planes. Jet gasoline is carried in, often on vehicles or in pipelines to a central fueling system. Vans can then decide it up and produce it to a aircraft because it sits at a gate.  

That complete system won’t work so effectively for hydrogen, Eremenko says. Pipelines carrying hydrogen are liable to leak, and retaining hydrogen in a liquid kind requires cooling it all the way down to cryogenic temperatures, which frequently means there’s plenty of loss when transferring it from one container to a different. 

The answer, as Eremenko sees it, seems to be rather a lot like considered one of my prized possessions: a Nespresso espresso maker. Common Hydrogen plans to construct and use pods stuffed with hydrogen gasoline that may be loaded and unloaded from its airplanes, stopping the necessity to switch hydrogen between totally different containers. 

The check flight this week gained’t use these pods, because the focus is ensuring the aircraft’s propulsion system works as supposed. The Sprint 8-300 that might be flying might be powered utilizing hydrogen tanks stuffed up earlier than flight, however future check flights will use the capsule system to check out how that works within the air, Eremenko says.