The EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (hereinafter “EuroHPC JU”), will contribute to the ambition of value creation in the Union with the overall mission to develop, deploy, extend and maintain in the Union an integrated world class supercomputing and quantum computing infrastructure and to develop and support a highly competitive and innovative High Performance Computing (HPC) ecosystem, extreme scale, power-efficient and highly resilient HPC and data technologies.
Proposals should focus on the development of an aerospace applicable liquid hydrogen storage system. There are various thermal, mechanical, safety and system integration challenges associated with this. Compared to kerosene in the wing, hydrogen storage leads to additional mass for the aircraft and requires additional space (LH2 has 4 times the volume compared to kerosene at iso-energy content). Therefore it has a significant impact on the overall energy required for a mission due to both weight and volume with drag penalty.
The analysis of dynamic loads as a result of fuel sloshing should be addressed numerically and experimentally, as well as the pressure development in the tank due to the interaction of the sloshing hydrogen and the thermodynamic environment in the tank. The design solution should address the changing pressure by either active or passive means (e.g. active pressurisation control or passive anti-sloshing devices), to ensure safe operation of the engine feed systems.
The system shall manage both normal and failed system states safely. Wireless and low energy systems shall be investigated to maximise safety and maintainability. The tank should have means to safely manage overpressure cases by a venting system to minimise risk of ignition and the impacts of cryogenic temperatures. The hydrogen fuel tank should be able to facilitate applications of hydrogen burn engines as well as hydrogen fuel cell-based powertrains with minor adaptations only, permitting for either centralised boil off or distributed boil off management.
Considerations to the refuelling interface should be given, but the interface it-self is out of scope of this topic. Boundary conditions for this refuelling consideration include: