5 March 2008
Innovation

Fuel cells – which produce electricity in a cleaner, more efficient way than combustion engines – are of interest to Airbus for future application on its family of jetliners.

A fuel cell transforms the energy contained in hydrogen into electricity by combining hydrogen with oxygen in a “cold” combustion. The exhaust product is water, which is a clean byproduct that also can be used for the aircraft’s water and waste system – saving weight, and therefore reducing fuel consumption.

Airbus and its two partners, the German DLR aerospace centre and Michelin, successfully performed the first test flight on a civil aircraft using a fuel cell system to provide power for the aircraft’s back-up systems.

This milestone test flight was carried out in February 2008 on an A320 test aircraft owned by the DLR. During the evaluation, the A320’s fuel cell system produced up to 20 kilowatts, powering the electric motor pump and the back-up hydraulic circuit, while also controlling the spoilers, ailerons and elevator actuator.

Today, fuel cells for commercial aviation are at an early stage of research and technology, and it is not expected that such systems as currently conceived could be utilised for commercial aircraft propulsion. This requires a thousand times the electric energy that was produced during the A320’s test flight.

To use fuel cells more extensively on-board commercial aircraft, further improvements need to be made in terms of the amount of energy they produce versus their weight (the kilowatt per kilogramme ratio). Fuel cells could eventually replace aircraft functions that currently require an Auxiliary Power Unit (APU), such as main engine start and air conditioning – thus paving the way towards emissions-free ground operations.