Dec 132011
The Lockheed CL-1317, a 1977 design for a hydrogen fueled jetliner. Done for NASA, this was one of a large number of jetliners designed to use cryogenic fuels… hydrogen mainly, with several methane designs. For those who don’t remember 1977, it *sucked.* The era of petroleum seemed like it would probably end tomorrow, and so non-fossil-fuel system studies (such as Solar Power Satellites) were all the rage. A hydrogen fueled jetliner would seem obvious, but as can be seen from the diagram, the extremely low density of liquid hydrogen meant extremely large fuel tanks.
8 Responses to “CL-1317 Lockheed Hydrogen fueled jetliner”
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Hydrogen would kind of suck, even compressed into a liquid it’s still not really all that dense.
I heard somewhere that the Ruskies had some luck fueling aircraft with natural gas, which seems a mite more practical.
The hangup in my mind is that I have a hard time imagining an airplane like this crashing and it resulting in anything but a giant ball of fire with the death of all onboard.
The russians did test a cryogenic airliner : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-155
do i see right, there no connection between Cockpit and Passenger compartment ?
That’s correct. It would certainly limit hijacking opportunities.
How much of the engines’ thrust would have to be diverted to bleed air to stop the cabin from assuming the temperature of LH2?
We did some similar designs in my college conceptual design class. The best any of us could do for density was to go with slush hydrogen, but even then all our planes grew into monsters.
Pity one can’t easily scavange the Hydrogen from air moisture or the like.
There is very little free hydrogen on Earth. If you want it, you either crack it from petrochemicals, electrozap it from water (hideously energy-costly), or use some bio-fuel approach (bacteria, algae, whatever).