Airframe & Systems Design
Patrick.Egerer[at]bauhaus-luftfahrt.net
+49 (0) 89-30 74-84922
The substitution of kerosene with the carbon-free energy source hydrogen presents industry and science with many new technical challenges. Cryogenically stored hydrogen, as envisaged for aviation, has the potential to be used as a heat sink to increase efficiency in the engine cycle process even before combustion.
This opens up many new possibilities for designing the cycle process and shifts the overall system's optimal parameters. New metrics that link emissions to the resulting climate impact are even more necessary to assess environmental compatibility, as CO2 is no longer produced. These climate metrics must already be usable in the concept phase so that they can be taken into account during design and optimization. To address the new questions that arise, tools are needed that can model and evaluate the specific characteristics and interdisciplinary connections of hydrogen direct combustion.
The goal of this collaborative project is to provide such a tool based on the globally established preliminary design and performance calculation software of the project leader, GasTurb. The necessary methods and procedures for this will be developed and validated within the 36-month project duration. Initially, model development will be carried out by the project partners: GasTurb and the IST of RWTH will develop component models and integrate them into new engine configurations, the ITV and IKDG of RWTH will investigate the combustion processes in H2 engine combustion chambers and derive emission prediction models, and the Bauhaus Luftfahrt will model the climate impact and derive suitable climate metrics for engine performance calculations. All these newly and further developed models will be integrated into GasTurb.
A particular goal of the development is that the new tools are usable even by users without expert knowledge in the various disciplines, thus providing low-threshold access to the extended design and evaluation capabilities for environmentally friendly H2 engines.
Bauhaus Luftfahrt is primarily responsible within the consortium for the main work package 4 on climate impact, as well as the foundational work package AP 1.3, with the goal of determining a "climate impact factor" for the gas turbine at various operating points and incorporating the climate impact directly into the preliminary design. For this purpose, Bauhaus Luftfahrt is developing a suitable climate metric based on existing literature.
Additionally, Bauhaus Luftfahrt supports GasTurb in integrating the developed metric into the design software and defining key user inputs. In work package AP 5.4, Bauhaus Luftfahrt assists in the final assessment of the performance and climate benefits of climate-optimized hydrogen gas turbines using the newly developed tools from the consortium, focusing on the emissions and technology scenarios developed by Bauhaus Luftfahrt in AP 1.3.
The underlying project was funded by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action under the funding code ---------.