HyPoint's "turbine fuel cell" is expected to improve eVTOL aircraft mileage and
According to foreign media New Atlas, a Russian-American joint venture company said that its new "turbine air-cooled" fuel cell design can provide three times the power of ordinary fuel cells and four times the life of ordinary fuel cells. The hydrogen-powered electric VTOL aircraft opened the door. In the aviation industry, weight is everything, and weight is even more important when it comes to energy-intensive vertical takeoffs and landings as expected by upcoming electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) competitors. Almost all companies are using lithium batteries to build prototypes, but the fact is simple, there is still much room for improvement in the energy density of lithium batteries. Commercial air taxis need to fly all day instead of connecting to a charging station for a long time, so every company planning around lithium batteries is praying that a magical new chemical composition will emerge from the test laboratory to make it The capacity is twice or three times that of the best batteries. This is likely to happen, but hydrogen has begun to become a good alternative. In terms of ground transportation, hydrogen is a trouble, but in the field of electric aviation, it may be a perfect choice. It provides higher energy density and is expected to achieve excellent flight endurance, and it allows you to fill up fuel in a few minutes, just like filling up a car's fuel tank. In fact, some companies have already begun to bet on it. Skai, an eVTOL startup on the east coast of the United States, is scrambling to launch a six-rotor, five-seater aircraft that can fly in the air for 4 hours or 400 miles (644 kilometers) before you need to refuel a hydrogen tank. But a Russian-American joint venture startup said that the perfect eVTOL power system still lacks a puzzle: lightweight, high-power fuel cell design. The California-based startup is called HyPoint. Starting in 2018, HyPoint began to manufacture low-temperature proton exchange membrane (LTPEM) fuel cell systems for industrial-grade UAV systems. But since moving to Silicon Valley and being taken by the Alchemist accelerator catalog, the company began to focus on bigger goals. "When we came to the United States, we saw a huge potential market in the field of urban air mobility," said Dr. Alex Ivanenenko, the company's CEO. "The main driving forces of this market are mobility, compactness and energy density. Now, the main power system is built on lithium batteries, and lithium batteries have a basic technical barrier. The existing lithium batteries have lower energy density, The existing fuel cells have low specific power. The air transportation market requires high specific power and high energy density. There is currently no single power supply that can meet both requirements. Lithium cannot be used, nor can fuel cells." It is predicted that the appropriate lithium battery technology may still have 15 years, and the HyPoint team began to focus on the fuel cell design specifically for eVTOL. Ivanenenko said that in order to maintain light weight, an air-cooled design must be adopted; liquid-cooled fuel cells work well in the automotive field, but the related coolant tanks and pumps will increase the parasitic mass and cannot be flown in the aviation field. He said that the power capacity and life of currently available air-cooled fuel cells are limited, and can only work at a temperature of -5 to 30 °C. Therefore, the HyPoint team set out to develop faster and more durable products and proposed what they called "turbine air-cooled fuel cells." "We put the fuel cell stack in the air duct and circulate the pressurized, humidified and thermally stable air through the fan to increase the power of the fuel cell stack." Ivanenenko said. "The compression system maintains the compression of air within about 3 bar, the air with reduced oxygen content is filled through the control valve, and then replaced with fresh compressed air with normal oxygen content." The additional oxygen on the cathode side of the fuel cell stack is combined with the new high-temperature proton exchange membrane (HTPEM) technology developed by HyPoint to make the amount of hydrogen that can pass through the fuel cell three times that of the traditional design, without adding any weight to the VTOL aircraft. In the case of reduced parasitic cooling quality, its specific power output is tripled. Considering the entire system, the HyPoint system can provide 2000 watts per kilogram (2.2 pounds) of mass. The power of the best liquid-cooled fuel cells is between 150-800 watts/kg, and the power of other air-cooled fuel cells is about 800 watts/kg. According to HyPoint’s own data, the energy density of the entire system is about 960 Wh/kg, and the energy density of lithium batteries is usually one-third of this figure, while the energy density of other air and liquid-cooled fuel cell systems is slightly higher In half. Ivanenenko said that the system has some other huge benefits; it can accept "dirty" hydrogen with a purity of only 99%, which is much lower in cost than the 99.999% purified hydrogen required by the LPTEM system. "This is a huge drop in important operating parameters for a commercial eVTOL operation," he added. It can work more or less at any real-world temperature, from -50 to +50°C (-58 to 122°F) and higher. Although it is still in the laboratory at this stage, the team expects that these fuel cells can continue to operate for about 20,000 hours without maintenance, while the LTPEM system can usually continue to operate for about 5,000 hours-this is for commercial operators Another very important factor. HyPoint has already reached out to some major players in the emerging eVTOL market in the US, Europe and Australia, Ivanenenko said, but he can't mention the names of these companies for now, except for ZeroAvia and Bartini. "We see a lot of interest in many companies," he said. "We believe we have found a solution for them. Many of them asked us to verify our technology with prototypes, because so far, we have only verified in the laboratory. We also agree with this view. So we this year The development plan is to make a 15 to 20 kilowatt prototype to verify this technology. Then form a complete scale in 2022, such as a 150-200 kilowatt system." He said that switching from a lithium-powered prototype to a hydrogen-powered system should not require a complete redesign of most eVTOL fuselages. Therefore, if competitors are willing to move something within the aircraft design, then more or less any competition All of them have the opportunity to realize long-distance flight with fast refueling. What about security? Will hydrogen-powered eVTOL have an explosion risk? "This is a question generally raised by consumers," Ivanenenko said. "That doesn't matter, because I think most consumers' technology will be difficult to switch to hydrogen technology anyway. This is one of the reasons why we focus on B2B with large companies that care about efficiency." "But yes,'This is a hydrogen bomb!' Remember the Hindenburg! That was in 1938. It happened almost a hundred years ago. People need to understand that hydrogen, oxygen, propane and natural gas all belong to the same category. Dangerous flammable gas. The propane bottle you use on the grill has the same warning certificate, which is the same type as hydrogen. Hydrogen has no special danger level. Moreover, hydrogen is the lightest gas in the universe and cannot be concentrated on site To that dangerous concentration, it may cause a big explosion. Of course, you have to follow special safety rules, but don’t be afraid of hydrogen. Oxygen is much more dangerous." He went on to point out that he was driving a Toyota Mirai hydrogen-powered car. "It has undergone a thorough safety crash test. Any manufacturer of hydrogen power systems understands what steps need to be taken in a particular application to obtain the corresponding safety certificate, and we are no exception."
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