An aircraft that runs on liquid hydrogen has successfully completed its first test flights by the U.S. company AeroVironment. Combine liquid hydrogen stored on board, pulled from the air with oxygen in fuel cells, and the propeller works with electricity produced by this process.
According to the company AeroVironment, a full tank of hydrogen would be enough for the plane remain in the sky for 24 hours.
The plane is called Global Observer and operates without a pilot. Has a row of eight in its wing propellers are powered by hydrogen. The fact that the plane carrying liquid hydrogen on board means that it is critical to isolate the tank where this is stored. The company has not offered details on the design of the tank and not on the nature of the fuel cells combine hydrogen and oxygen on the one hand the other to extract the sky while flying.
According to the company, have already conducted two test flights of just over an hour each. What most interested the scientists who designed the plane was to test the ability to handle the liquid hydrogen. AeroVironment
hopes to sell planes as Global Note as an alternative telecommunications platforms rather than the current satellites. Airplanes that use hydrogen as an energy source would reduce the impact of aviation on climate change since the cheap gas emissions are growing faster than emissions from other sectors. New breakthroughs in clean fuels such as hydrogen, could help reverse this trend.
Source: BBC Science.
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