These are the first in-flight pictures of a fuel-cell powered helicopter developed by the research arm of high-tech engineering firm UTC Corporation, taken yesterday afternoon, local time.
The Connecticut, US-based company said the trials, which were carried out by its United Technologies Research Centre (UTRC) division, had been a success. The hydrogen-powered helicopter flew for the first time in October last year and is a technology demonstrator for UTC’s proton exchange membrane fuel cells.
Engineers at the research centre developed the helicopter because it represented a considerable technical challenge to achieve the necessary power density to get the small craft airborne from a fuel cell. The project allowed the company to use existing proprietary technologies and develop some new ones which it hopes could be used on other areas of the business. UTC Corp specialises in serving the space, defence, transportation and built environment sectors. Many of its fuel cells are already used around the world to provide power to buildings, both as baseload and as redundancy systems in the event of a failure of the grid.
David Parekh, UTRC Director, said combining fuel cells with aircraft was a challenge that had only been taken up this decade despite the long history of aviation and development of fuel cells in the 1930s. “The engineering community has just begun to understand how to develop fuel cells that have the high power density and low volume required in aviation – it really is the toughest application.” The first flight of a fuel-cell powered glider took place in 2003. “The power density required by a helicopter is five times that of a glider, so we really set our engineers a challenge,” Parekh said.
The technologies developed for the helicopter will now be evaluated by UTRC for transfer into projects in transportation and the built environment. “These are new technologies that we want to be able to offer to our other businesses,” Parekh concluded.
© PE Publishing, 9 December 2009
