PRELIMINARY ASSESSMENT OF HYDROGEN POTENTIAL AS ALTERNATIVE FUEL FOR REGIONAL AIRCRAFT

Pollution and environmental impact are at the core of recent European Commission policies, which have imposed stringent regulations on the emissions of greenhouse gases.At this purpose, several companies in the transportation sector, as well as aeronautical sector, started to look for alternative propulsion systems and fuels with specific R&D activities.This paper explores the feasibility of using hydrogen on board of regional airlines planes Taking into account that hydrogen has a significant gravimetric energy density (120 MJ/kg), but at the same time, a low density (0.0899 kg/m3), making its storage and transportation heavy and complex.To assess the potential of hydrogen as an alternative fuel for regional air transport, this paper analyzes the possibility of using hydrogen as a fuel on a typical aircraft for such applications, the ATR 72-600.This paper research focuses on evaluating the weights to be carried on board the aircraft, targeting to replace traditional propulsion systems with four different plant architectures (thus also targeting mixed architectures not yet explored in literature): hydrogen-fuelled gas turbine, electric propulsion powered by a gas turbine and fuel cells in parallel, fully electric propulsion using only fuel cells, and finally, an electric hybrid configuration with fuel cells combined with a battery.The paper benchmarks all of them also looking at potential future technological evolution and trends as well as at the need of EU regional aviation potential hydrogen demand.