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from the the-Hindenberg-steam-engine-crossbreed dept.
‘They said we were eccentrics’: the UK team developing clean aviation fuel:
“Anyone passing would have wondered why these people were staring at a pipe and whooping and laughing,” says Bobby Sethi, associate professor of gas turbine combustion at Cranfield University. “But we were almost certainly the only people in the world right then burning anything without producing CO2.”
[...] “We were able to demonstrate successful ignition and safe combustion of pure hydrogen and air at high temperature and pressure – producing no carbon emissions,” he says. Even if, he adds, the passing layperson would have only seen a pipe and some steam.
[...] Sethi recalls the scepticism of even five years ago, when he was pursuing funding for the hydrogen research project, known as Enable H2: “They said we were eccentrics. Now they’re queueing up to be on our advisory board.”
There are broadly three strands of work that the aviation industry is frantically investigating for an environmentally acceptable future. One is to create greener fuels for the large aircraft currently in service. A second is electric flight, which appears feasible for smaller aircraft and short-haul hops. And a third is hydrogen.
Two projects pioneered at Cranfield are using hydrogen in the form of fuel cells to power electric motors and propel planes: ZeroAvia flew a six-seater from here last September, and hopes to scale up the technology for commercial short-haul flights in the coming decades. Another, Project Fresson, is planning to use fuel cells for a green, short-hop passenger service around the Orkney islands as soon as 2023.
But the ambitions for direct combustion of hydrogen are on a bigger scale; whether a radically different plane and propulsion system could replace the modern, paraffin-fuelled passenger jet. Which is where Sethi’s research comes in.
Nothing yet in the sheds looks anything like a plane. The rig here is a unique facility, Sethi says, assembled to show that hydrogen can be clean, safe and efficient for aviation, and produce data showing the optimum temperature and pressure to minimise other harmful emissions such as nitrogen oxides or NOx, a family of highly poisonous gases.
Not the only scientists looking for controlled ignition of hydrogen. What's described still seems a long way away from something that produces thrust, which is the ultimate need. However, technology usually advances in small steps, and that's fine as long as there's an ultimately reachable goal.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Saturday August 21 2021, @10:04PM
Orbital solar is more valuable for solving the storage problem - ground-solar generates near-zero power form most of the day (night), including those times when energy consumption is highest, and can be offline for weeks at a time if the weather is particularly uncooperative. The problem orbital solar really solves is eliminating the need for storage, since it can generate power 24/7, and clouds are transparent to properly tuned microwave power transmission. Even then though, there's a lot of storage systems far cheaper than an orbital solar array.
Orbital sunlight concentration might have interesting potential though - giant utra-thin mylar mirrors could be vastly cheaper than solar power stations, and refocus sunlight on ground-based solar plants throughout the night. By maintaining noon-time illumination levels 24 hours a day you'd be pushing 5x the daily energy production, without any "dead times". Assuming a large swarm in low orbit serving sites around the world, you could potentially even selectively re-target a protion of the redirected sunlight from areas passing through the low-demand part of the daily curve, to those currently experiencing high demand. You could probably even increase light levels to a few times natural noon-time levels without presenting an immediate survival hazard to anyone in the area. Though even just sustained noon-time levels would likely make the area unpleasant enough that almost nothing would live there. Though I suppose polar regions might flourish - you could create "islands" that never suffered the winter loss of sunlight, maybe even seeing an increase to compensate for the surrounding cold. Come to think of it, you could probably do something similar to create oases of optimal year-round growing seasons anywhere on Earth.