Hydrogen Aircraft Sloshing Tank Advancement

Environmental concerns motivate a transition to liquid hydrogen aviation fuel in coming decades, and for this technology the size, placement and connections of the hydrogen tank on an aircraft are key decisions.

The Hydrogen Aircraft Sloshing Tank Advancement project (HASTA) aims to experimentally and computationally investigate the storage of liquid hydrogen (LH2) for airborne use as fuel in civil aircraft applications.

Size and position of a LH2 tank inside an aircraft are limiting factors for range, payload and aircraft size, and consequently play a crucial role in the environmental impact.

The goal of facilitating tank design will be achieved through creation of design criteria for LH2 aircraft tanks; these design guidelines will be based on the different tools and models of derived during the project, in particular those aimed at complex cryogenic sloshing.The experimentally validated design tools developed during HASTA are to be used for both conceptual and detailed design in the aircraft industry, and therefore span a range of fidelities from reduced order models to full computational methods.

The primary focus of this project will be the development of LH2 capabilities, and particularly the extension of mature capabilities already available for sloshing of standard civil aircraft fuel (kerosene) to the cryogenic temperatures associated with LH2.

These capabilities are well reflected in the composition of the consortium, which includes partners with both experimental and modelling experience of fuel slosh, as well as cryogenics for space applications.

The ultimate goal of the project is development of experimentally validated numerical and analytical simulation tools to model the complex thermo-fluid-dynamics of cryogenic LH2 coupled to the thermo–mechanical behavior of a tank and its operational environment.