New Airbus Facility To Research Cryogenic Fuel Systems For Next-Gen Hydrogen Planes (cnbc.com) 68
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Airbus is launching a U.K.-based facility focused on hydrogen technologies, a move which represents the firm's latest attempt to support the design of its next generation of aircraft. In a statement Wednesday, Airbus said the Zero Emission Development Centre in Filton, Bristol, had already begun working on the development of the tech. One of the site's main goals will center around work on what Airbus called a "cost-competitive cryogenic fuel system" that its ZEROe aircraft will need.
Details of three zero-emission, "hybrid-hydrogen" concept planes under the ZEROe moniker were released back in Sept. 2020. Airbus has said it wants to develop "zero-emission commercial aircraft" by the year 2035. The ZEDC in the U.K. will join other similar sites in Spain, Germany and France. "All Airbus ZEDCs are expected to be fully operational and ready for ground testing with the first fully functional cryogenic hydrogen tank during 2023, and with flight testing starting in 2026," the company said.
Details of three zero-emission, "hybrid-hydrogen" concept planes under the ZEROe moniker were released back in Sept. 2020. Airbus has said it wants to develop "zero-emission commercial aircraft" by the year 2035. The ZEDC in the U.K. will join other similar sites in Spain, Germany and France. "All Airbus ZEDCs are expected to be fully operational and ready for ground testing with the first fully functional cryogenic hydrogen tank during 2023, and with flight testing starting in 2026," the company said.
Oh the humanity! (Score:3, Insightful)
But seriously, nowhere in the article does it say where they are going to get all that zero-emission hydrogen from.
And if you are going to cryogenic fuel, why not start with methane?
The advantages of much higher boiling point and lower volume surely far outweigh the lower energy density per kg.
Methane powered turbines are a mature technology, and both fuels can theoretically be synthesised, so have on-paper green cred for 2035.
Additionally, the ground infrastructure is there for methane, whereas transport and storage of hydrogen is a nightmare.
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https://www.bloomberg.com/news... [bloomberg.com]
I have heard of a scheme to transport hydrogen by adding carbon to make it into methane, so, sure, maybe that. Some people are really skeptical of net zero though, and just want plain old zero - fewer opportunities to cheat perhaps.
Choosing your Problem (Score:3)
And if you are going to cryogenic fuel, why not start with methane?
If you are going to synthesize your fuel in some green fashion why not start with kerosene since that's what planes already use? The problem is that synthesizing fuel in a way that is carbon neutral is extremely hard so, much as I share your scepticism about a safe and reliable cryogenic fuel storage system for planes, let alone one for hydrogen, it may be that the fuel storage problem is something they think is easier to solve than making synthetic fuel in a carbon-neutral manner.
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If you are going to synthesize your fuel in some green fashion why not start with kerosene since that's what planes already use?
That's already been demonstrated. But that is something for the oil companies to do. The article is about Airbus Industries designing new aircraft. How is that a problem for Airbus?
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If you are going to synthesize your fuel in some green fashion why not start with kerosene since that's what planes already use? The problem is that synthesizing fuel in a way that is carbon neutral is extremely hard so
Define hard. Hard as in expensive? Hard as in requiring equipment? Or hard as in requiring expertise? Synthesising green kerosene is actually significantly harder than green hydrogen, not the least reason of which is that it universally requires a hydroprocessing facility. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out what the "hydro" in hyrdoprocessing stands for.
Incidentally this is the same problem that oil companies are attacking on multiple fronts. On the one side there is an incredible numb
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It's not really that hard. There are working industrial scale gasoline/diesel/kerosene synthesis plants and have been for quite a while. It's just more expensive than pumping it out of the ground, so they're not profitable.
Electrolysing water to get hydrogen is definitely easier, and I expect more efficient since you need a source of hydrogen for the hydrocarbons anyway.
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Additionally, the ground infrastructure is there for methane, whereas transport and storage of hydrogen is a nightmare.
This isn't like cars, where you need a vast transportation network. All you need is to get it to airports.
Re: Oh the humanity! (Score:1)
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nowhere in the article does it say where they are going to get all that zero-emission hydrogen from.
You're joking right? Blue and green hydrogen is about the only thing the oil industry has been talking about for the past 3 years. Basically every investment in oil/gas is currently for making blue and green hydrogen, not just for a transportation sector, but for the industrial sector. A 1GW facility has already broken ground in Teeside UK, another 2GW is going up in the Port of Rotterdam, ground has been broken on several facilities in Germany such as Lingen as well.
Why do I mention those examples specific
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*you* might want to learn how blue hydrogen is made before launching on a pompous lecture. And learn to read before frothing at the mouth.
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I know how blue hydrogen is made. A combination of traditional SMR / PoX gasification with a shift reaction in combination with CCS to sequester the carbon emitted in the process.
Now your turn. Explain to me:
a) Why you think burning methane and emitting CO2 into the atmosphere achieves green goals compared to sequestering it.
b) Why you think I am wrong about the answer to your question of where the hydrogen comes from. You can feel free to look this up on any oil company's webpage. Here, let me do the work
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Australia and the Middle East will likely become the main hydrogen producers assuming civilization survives that long. PV electricity will become essentially free at 50% duty cycle.
Renewable power to methane/propane requires direct air carbon capture, carbon monoxide formation and Fischer Tropf on top of electrolysis. It can be done, but it's not necessarily cheaper than putting up with the headaches of hydrogen.
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Maybe a Slashdot myth. Wikipedia says the Americans have as much hydrogen pipeline as Europe does (~1500 km).
Lockheed (Score:1)
Lockheed has numerous expired Hydrogen cryogenic aerospace patents
Since the 1970’s Lockheed patents for liquid hydrogen fueled aerospace applications are all expired!
Airbus reinvents it pretends that it needs to wait, when a corpus of engineering is finished plus ready to go!
Elon Musk and his team probably reviewed some of those expired patents to look for overlap options with Starship?
Patents expired are public domain to Airbus, Boeing and startups as well as Lockheed itself. Post your found URL view
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Airbus reinvents it pretends that it needs to wait, when a corpus of engineering is finished plus ready to go!
Airbus doesn't have the engineering corpus. Patents don't generally do the engineering work for you. They often don't give every detail you actually need to know either, regardless of whether they are supposed to or not.
Also, they surely will want to create their own patents, so they can leech off of others and retard competitive progress.
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Lockheed has numerous expired Hydrogen cryogenic aerospace patents
Since the 1970’s Lockheed patents for liquid hydrogen fueled aerospace applications are all expired!
And some of the work was Lockheed was probably informed by UK work in the 1950s through defence technology sharing arrangements. A recent UK start-up's vision of a hydrogen plane looked stunningly similar to a British design (not built) from the mid-50s. If I hadn't lent out the book with the details in it I'd tell you what it was. This stuff has been going for a long time.
I expect UK to be ahead on this. (Score:4, Interesting)
It was with the UK department of energy study that had Dr. David MacKay really give the numbers on energy in the UK. UK had to choose independence on reaching zero carbon, or get zero carbon imported into the UK. Going it alone meant nuclear power. Importing energy meant being tied to the EU or some other nation to keep the lights on, a wise choice with Russia invading Ukraine.
https://www.ted.com/talks/davi... [ted.com]
UK need nuclear power plants, synthesized fuel, nuclear powered ships, onshore wind, pumped hydro, and natural gas with carbon capture.
I'd much rather see synthesized kerosene for aircraft fuel then hydrogen. Maybe this is tech that's going to be applied to spaceflight, but even that is showing cryogenic methane as more promising.
I just wish they'd move more quickly on nuclear power. Maybe they have a plan I don't comprehend. If so then I'd like an explanation.
Good job. I hope you know what you are doing.
Re: I expect UK to be ahead on this. (Score:1)
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Making liquid hydrogen is always a two step process. They have to make the hydrogen then cool it off. We've seen kerosene made in a one step process before by putting a high carbon substance in contact with a high carbon substance, then add a catalyst and heat. Making carbon neutral kerosene can be a two step process like making carbon neutral hydrogen. Step one is extract CO2 from the air, step two is add CO2 (the high carbon substance) in contact with heat and water (the high hydrogen content substanc
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I'd much rather see synthesized kerosene for aircraft fuel then hydrogen.
You can't synthesize kerosene from green sources without hydrogen, so why not work to cut out the middleman? Burning kerosene still generates emissions. Incidentally the UK recognised the importance of clean hydrogen in every part of industrial processes, not just burning it by end users which is precisely the rationale behind the Net Zero Teeside project. One way or the other you'll need hydrogen.
I just wish they'd move more quickly on nuclear power.
For what goal? Specifically what timeframe? With a steady ramp down of emissions most western nations can't eve
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You can't synthesize kerosene from green sources without hydrogen, so why not work to cut out the middleman?
Density and storage, but it might make more sense to make ammonia than kerosene as a halfway house in terms of storage and density and cost. Going all the way to kerosene is probably not viable except for niche applications, and air travel may not be sufficiently niche. If it is, then the cost could mean we see a resurgence of continental-level rail travel of the sort available in some parts of Europe and China. OK, China isn't a continent, but it is still quite big. It might also mean that in 2050 there mi
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Ammonia accidents are a total shitshow. Very slow to disperse and toxic are a bad combination, a blanket of death.
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Ammonia accidents are a total shitshow.
I'm not suggesting ammonia is perfect. Hydrogen has lots of issues, kerosene is likely to be too expensive. Ammonia is easier to produce than kerosene. It could be that propane is seen as preferable, but none are without issues. Absent a new and cheaper process for creating kerosene then unless things like hydrogen are successful then air travel may get slower and/or more expensive.
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Every other farmer is running around with tankers full of ammonia, spraying it around on purpose. I expect airports could handle it safely.
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No they are not.
Ammonia is a gas. Pretty pointless to spray on a farm.
And it is poisonous.
Depending on wind and other factors: you would kill yourself.
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Totes.
https://iowaagliteracy.wordpre... [wordpress.com]
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Massive tanks of anhydrous ammonia. They inject it into the soil where it's converted to ammonium. It's pretty much the best source of nitrogen-per-unit-of-work possible for farmers, so it's what they use.
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Injecting into the soil, if that makes sense, is most certainly not the same as "spraying over a field", which is impossible.
The only thing you could do would be to find a sprayable solution, from which the ammonia is not escaping quickly.
You could use a water solution, but the ammonia usually would escape quickly, you probably lose 90% of it. But if it is cheap enough, I guess some idiots would do it, wearing a gas mask while riding the tractor :P
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Injecting into the soil, if that makes sense, is most certainly not the same as "spraying over a field", which is impossible.
You're splitting hairs. Yes, the people who said "sprayed over a field..." were not technically accurate, but the process isn't far from that.
The only thing you could do would be to find a sprayable solution, from which the ammonia is not escaping quickly.
Yup. The machine heavily disturbs the dirt while blasting liquid ammonia into it. As it turns into gas, it mixes with the water in the dirt and stabilizes into ammonium. That ammonium is then (mostly) buried in the disturbed soil.
You could use a water solution, but the ammonia usually would escape quickly, you probably lose 90% of it. But if it is cheap enough, I guess some idiots would do it, wearing a gas mask while riding the tractor :P
The water solution (ammonium) is created in the process.
You don't lose 90% of it. You actually lose very little (which is why it's safe).
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Interesting approach.
Thanx for the info.
Re: "Is Python About to Get Faster?" (Score:1)
As a lack of a better point as the other discussion got closed ....
A late answer to: https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org]
Nitpicking on:
struct myStruct { uint8_t my_int }; takes exactly 8 bits.
No it does not. It will cost you "register size" of memory. And on modern machines that is 64 bits.
Nitpicking off.
Unless you have a fancy esoteric compiler with fancy esoteric compiler options. That means an array of such structs will hold on 64bit machines 64 bit sized structs in that array, aka an array of size 100 is 640 bytes big.
With Python using probably Hash Tables for o
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Density and storage
May take a back seat. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good enough. There's no one singular ideal requirement for aircraft, both in terms of range or payload. There's also not only one fuel they fly on.
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Density and storage
May take a back seat. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good enough. There's no one singular ideal requirement for aircraft, both in terms of range or payload. There's also not only one fuel they fly on.
If the energy isn't dense you end up with a bigger plane with more drag that requires more fuel. If storage requires heavy tanks you need more fuel to make up for the weight. They are the problems that have prevented hydrogen-fuelled aircraft being viable so far.
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Energy density can't take a backseat. That backseat is still inside the airplane so you can't just take off without it.
We have kerosene fueled jets because we can put the kerosene in the wings. We can't do that with liquid hydrogen because it would boil and bend the wings into new and creative shapes, or frost up with ice so thick that they'd break off before the plane got airborne.
We can put the hydrogen tanks in the "backseat" but then we just cut the cabin volume in half. That means half as many reven
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Just what do you think your chances are of starting a nuclear project today and having it commissioned before 2035?
The chances are zero if everyone gives up before even trying.
During the peak of nuclear power plant construction we'd routinely see nuclear power plants built, from breaking ground to putting electrons on the grid, in 5 to 10 years. There's plenty of studies showing nuclear power plant construction time averages in the 7 to 8 year range. We've seen nuclear power plants built in 3, just three, years. They were "do or die" government/military projects so that removes a lot of constraints on government insp
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Full autarky is a pipe dream. For day to day electricity generation a nation should not want to be day to day dependent on foreign sources, but for hydrogen as fuel you can build a strategic reserve. So sure, build nuclear plants ... but if a foreign nation can deliver you hydrogen fuel far cheaper than with your native nuclear plants, I'd just import.
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If there's no domestic production of fuel then in case of a war your ability to fight runs out with your fuel reserve. Producing all the energy a nation needs domestically is not the goal. The goal is producing enough domestically that you'd be willing to go without imported energy nearly indefinitely. There would have to be enough energy to feed everyone, keep the military going, with enough left over to build more energy production before the tanks run dry.
There's also a matter of not all energy being
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The blindseer only sees things in his imaginary mind ...
Great (Score:3)
A cabin filled with cryogenic hydrogen is just what we need in a 'plane crash.
Seriously, who comes up with this stuff?
Re:Great FUD (Score:2)
This reminds me the scaremongering FUD propagated about electric vehicule fires, while quietly ignoring the far more explosive capability of gas/kerosene.
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Because a cabin filled with highly flammable kerosene is so much safer? Who comes up with this stuff? People who are clever enough to ignore silly whataboutisms.
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Kerosene is not, in general, highly flammable
You can tell that to all the people who burnt up in giant fireballs when their planes hit the ground. Or to the ground crews who bolt and and as a first order of business throw so much foam on planes you may confuse it for a snowy mountain.
By the way it has a flashpoint of 37C which is within 15deg of "ambient" and thus classed as flammable and not combustible.
Leave the engineering to engineers, and use your armchair for something else.
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You can tell that to all the people who burnt up in giant fireballs when their planes hit the ground.
Why did you ignore my qualification - if it isn't atomised.
By the way it has a flashpoint of 37C which is within 15deg of "ambient"
Gasoline has a flashpoint of -42C. So it must always be on fire, right?
http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2014/ph240/ukropina2/
With a much lower flash point, gasoline was easily integrated into cars in the early 20th century, running the relatively temperate piston engines. Kerosene, deemed safer with a higher flash point, vast global accessibility, and potent chemical energy easily slid in as the fuel of choice for planes across the globe.
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Planes have a center fuel tank too.
They do, and because of the risk, it's filled last, used first, and now inerting systems are required, at least in new aircraft. Sadly, you are right about the thankfully rare occasions when there has been a source of ignition in the centre tank.
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Currently, all jet planes... (Score:2)
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...emit large amounts of CO2. I can't see anything in this project that suggests these new planes would be any different. It's misleading to call them zero carbon. The vast majority of hydrogen is produced from fossil fuels & it's a lossy process.
It's at least possible to source hydrogen from water via electrolysis. Given the time taken to develop new aircraft (it could be 20 years) then they are betting on a significant proportion being 'green' by then. The hydrogen is at least fungible so even if in 2040 only 50% is green then by 2050 it might be 99%, and new aircraft are likely to be in service easily for 40 years, so 2080 before the first ones retire. So that means the overall use of green hydrogen by those aircraft might be in the region of 92
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Not if the fossil fuel companies & lobby groups have anything to do with it.
The likes of BP are already investing in hydrogen from electrolysis.
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Re: Currently, all jet planes... (Score:2)
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I've always thought that project managers were ridiculously overvalued, but reading comments on Slashdot is slowly changing my mind. It seems the concept of working on more than one task at a time is a bit of a foreign concept to most people.
If you draw out a Gantt chart you'll see that it's probably better to optimize hydrogen electrolysis and hydrogen applications in parallel, rather than serially.
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Who decides what "the most effective measures" are, and based on what criteria?
We know how to produce hydrogen from renewable electricity and water, and we're getting pretty good at it. Of all the clean fuels we can synthesize, it's the most efficient. Figuring out how to use it doesn't seem like such a bad idea.
Airbus makes airplanes. For anything but the shortest of flights (which France, where Airbus' head office is, has already started banning in favour of trains), some sort of fuel is probably going to
The problem is energy storage (Score:2)
Burning fossil fuels is only bad because it's sequestered carbon being released.
Hydrogen isn't very energy dense, it takes energy to generate it because nature hasn't spent millions of years building up convenient stores of it for you, and there's a lot of effort required to store it until you're ready to use it.
Using renewable energy to make synthetic fuels means a net-zero CO2 release. Burn away, enjoy the energy density of synthetic fuels while we wait for batteries to become competitive in terms of mas
For Turbines? (Score:2)
meanwhile on the assembly lines... (Score:1)