Consortium develops sustainable aircraft engines

Flying without pollutant emissions should be possible in the future.
Photo Credit: RUB, Marquard

A new drive technology should make air travel possible with a clear conscience.

In the face of climate change, many people get on the plane with a guilty conscience: the emission of climate-damaging carbon dioxide from the combustion of fossil fuels is high. An international consortium wants to change this: The aim of the "MYTHOS" project is to develop aircraft engines that can flexibly use various sustainably produced fuels up to pure hydrogen. The project called "Medium-range hybrid low-pollution flexi-fuel / hydrogen sustainable engine" will start from 1. January 2023 funded by the European Union for four years. The coordination is carried out by Prof. Dr. Francesca di Mare, holder of the professorship for thermal turbo machines and aircraft engines of the RUB.

The overarching goal to which the project team is committed is nothing less than the decarbonization of aviation. "We will be developing and demonstrating a groundbreaking design methodology for future short and medium-range civil engines that can use a wide range of liquid and gaseous fuels and ultimately pure hydrogen," said Francesca di Mare. The fuels for which the engines are to be designed include so-called Sustainable Aviation Fuels, or SAF for short: sustainably produced fuels that are not based on fossil fuels. In order to achieve these goals, the MYTHOS consortium develops a multidisciplinary modeling approach for the characterization of the relevant engine components and uses methods of machine learning.

Airports for the plane of the future

The team around Francesca di Mare is also involved in the new EU project "INDIGO: Integration and Digital Demonstration of Low-emission Aircraft Technologies and Airport Operations", which will also start in January 2023. The focus here is also on the clean aircraft of the future. However, they could look very different from today's machines. Models see, for example, a distributed drive with hybrid technologies and wide-ranging wings that allow quiet and emission-free flights near airports at low altitude. But what does that mean for airport operations?? The consortium of the project, which is coordinated at the Universidad Carlo III de Madrid, is developing methods to answer this question.

Source/Credit: Ruhr University Bochum

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