Aerostructural Optimisation of Dry Wings for Hydrogen Aircraft

The use of hydrogen as an energy carrier for aviation applications is gaining significant traction in the aerospace research community. This is primarily due to two significant advantages which are associated with hydrogen. First, due to the absence of carbon in its chemical composition, hydrogen does not produce any carbon emissions upon combustion. Second, hydrogen can also be used to generate electrical energy via fuel cell technology, and subsequently eliminate the combustion process in its entirety. Irrespective of these advantages, a major challenge that needs to be addressed in order to realize the industrial use of hydrogen in aviation comes from the storage point of view. Hydrogen has very low volumetric efficiency compared to conventional kerosene-based jet fuels. This means that a significantly larger volume is required to store the same mass of hydrogen as kerosene. Thereby, the classical design solution of storing fuel inside the aircraft wing is no longer feasible for hydrogen-based applications. The fuel in this case needs to be stored in the fuselage. This relieves the wing design process from a major volumetric constraint and opens up avenues for possibly better aero-structural designs of such fuel-less "dry" wings. The performance parameters of such a dry wing for a medium range aircraft resulting from an aero-structural optimization have been investigated in this study.