MODELLING HYDROGEN FUEL CELL AIRCRAFT IN SUAVE

Paper i proceeding, 2024

Methods for conceptually designing and assessing the mission performance of regional hydrogen fuel cell aircraft are implemented in the open-source software SUAVE. In order to design for and assess the performance in future operations, methods for sizing representative propulsion and fuel storage systems are implemented.Additionally, algorithms for airframe resizing are added in order to account for mass and geometry changes when redesigning existing regional aircraft for fuel cell propulsion. Dynamic methods for the fuel cell power demand and tank thermodynamics are implemented in order to asses the effect of fuel consumption and hydrogen boil-off on the aircraft’s mission performance. A set of tanks are designed for a fixed fuselage geometry to investigate the effect of fuel volume and number of tanks on tank gravimetric index (GI). A large fuel volume requires non-spherical tanks, which significantly lowers GI, and therefore increasing the number of tanks can be beneficial. An ATR42 regional turboprop is redesigned for fuel cell propulsion and liquid hydrogen stored in two aft-mounted tanks. A fuselage extension of 16% and reference area increase of 6% are needed for 6 m3 of fuel at maintained wingloading and power-to-weight ratio. MTOW increased by 6% and exhibits a shift in center-of-gravity of 5.5% between MTOW and MZFW conditions.