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 purpose 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 standard jet engine runs on the opposite. It’s an ordinary observe for testing out new programs in flight, says Common Hydrogen CEO and cofounder Paul Eremenko. 

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

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

That entire system may not work so nicely for hydrogen, Eremenko says. Pipelines carrying hydrogen are liable to leak, and maintaining hydrogen in a liquid type requires cooling it all the way down to cryogenic temperatures, which frequently means there’s a whole lot of loss when transferring it from one container to a different. 

The answer, as Eremenko sees it, appears quite a bit like certainly 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 completely different containers. 

The check flight this week gained’t use these pods, for the reason that 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.