Scaling-up hydrogen fuel cells for urban air mobility

Research Project, 2025 – 2026

Urban air mobility (UAM) systems are an emerging industry—and area of research—across Sweden and the EU. UAM systems have the potential to allow radically new modes of urban transport, but designing operational UAM vehicles is challenging: ensuring adequate range and payload with a sustainable propulsion system is particularly hard. Tailored designs of hydrogen fuel cell have the potential to improve existing UAM designs via the high gravimetric specific energy of hydrogen—but mature automobile fuel cell designs are not sufficiently weight-optimised to fulfil this role. In this project, we propose to scale-up existing in-house designs of small ultralight fuel cells to power large UAM vehicles.