Two important steps in Green Air Travel
These two new technologies can reduce emissions and make air travel greener!
Airline emissions have two problems - first, the jet engine pollute a lot, and second, they pollute high up in the atmosphere, where they cause a lot more damage. But engineers are testing two technologies to make air travel greener.
First, we need to understand how current aircraft engines work.
The aircraft engine takes a lot of air and uses it in two ways.
It compresses part of the air in the engine core, adds jet fuel and ignites the mixture. This ignition creates high-velocity hot air that spins the turbine that produces the thrust, which propels the aircraft.
The remaining air is allowed to flow around the engine core. If we get more air in this part, we get more thrust. That is why we get massive fans on today’s aircraft engines that we see when boarding the aircraft. The larger this fan, the better the efficiency.
Here is Pratt & Whitney video explaining how the engine works:
Making fans bigger!
It was clear that one way to make engines more efficient was to make the turbofans bigger. But it was not as easy. As fans go bigger, the weight of the engine and its size also increases.
To overcome this, engineers will use an old NASA concept developed during the 1970s oil price shock - the open fan design. GE has developed an engine based on this technology for the Boeing 7J7, an aircraft that was shelved later.
The older design was exciting but very noisy by today’s standards. However, using modern computer-aided design and analysis, engineers have managed to reduce noise and improve reliability.
We will be seeing these types of engines in a few years as they are substantially more efficient than the current ones. Airbus will be testing this technology exhaustively. Since Boeing had already done testing on an older version of this technology, they will also be in the game.
Hydrogen as the fuel!
Using hydrogen as a fuel for combustion has a tremendous advantage as there are no emissions, only water. This saves us from CO2, NOX and all other emissions and problems arising therefrom.
In 1988, the Soviets built a technology demonstrator Tupolev Tu-155 using hydrogen as fuel. There is significant research yet to be done in this field, but I expect we should be able to build that better today.
Airbus is going to test another technology, and that is using hydrogen as fuel. I am hoping that it succeeds.
In Sum
Environmentally friendly air travel option is on the horizon. This is as big a step in engineering as it is for global economic development.