Solid-state hydrogen storage company, Cella Energy, and the French aerospace company Herakles (Safran) have entered into a five-year exclusive cooperation plan based on Cella Energy’s solid-state hydrogen power systems for use on aircraft. The company’s lightweight, emission-free systems will replace jet fuel to provide electrical power on-board aircraft.
Over the past year, Cella Energy and Herakles have been working together to determine the feasibility of using Cella’s hydrogen storage material for aerospace applications.
“Reducing emissions in aerospace is one of the major objectives for the next decades. The increasing electrification of aircraft provides an opportunity to reduce the use of jet fuel by using an alternative and weight competitive power source such as hydrogen. Cella Energy has a unique hydrogen storage material that we believe could satisfy the industry’s requirements,” said Philippe Schleicher, Herakles’ CEO.
Each gram of Cella material produces up to 33 oz. of hydrogen gas which makes it ideal for mobile or portable applications where weight is an important factor. The material can be packaged into a cartridge that can be combined with a fuel cell to possess two to three times the specific energy of a lithium-ion battery, or to make a system comparable to 700 atmosphere compressed hydrogen but without the same safety concerns or cost of infrastructure, according to Cella Energy.
The material used in the power system has been deemed stable in air and avoids the need to use high-pressures, which helps to overcome the logistics and safety hurdles that hydrogen has to overcome in order to be acceptable in the aerospace industry.
Cella Energy believes that its hydrogen technology is versatile enough to meet power requirements for applications that range from a few watts to hundreds of kilowatts.
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