Meaningful reductions within reach
For decades, Airbus has presented its latest innovations, products and services at the Farnborough International Airshow (FIA), as well as revealing its new aircraft orders and partnerships. This year, the show provided an opportunity to physically showcase its ambition to decarbonise aviation.
At this year’s FIA, visitors experienced first-hand how Airbus is pioneering sustainable aerospace for a safe and united world. Here Airbus announced that it has joined the world’s largest clean hydrogen infrastructure investment fund, managed by Hy24 – a joint venture between Ardian, a world-leading private investment house and FiveTHydrogen, an investment manager specialising in clean hydrogen investments.
Hy24’s investment fund will provide financial capital to back credible, large-scale green hydrogen infrastructure projects world-wide. Airbus’ involvement assures its commitment to the scaling up of a global hydrogen economy, a prerequisite for the successful entry-intoservice of its zero-emission commercial aircraft by 2035.
“Since 2020, Airbus has partnered with numerous airlines, airports, energy providers and industry partners to develop a stepped approach to global hydrogen availability,” said Karine Guenan, VP ZEROe Ecosystem, Airbus. “Joining a fund of this magnitude demonstrates Airbus’ continuously active role in infrastructure investments for the production, storage and distribution of clean hydrogen worldwide.”
As the aviation industry transitions to meet its net-zero carbon emissions goal by 2050, a significant number of requirements need to be met. Investing in such funds offers complimentary access to direct partnerships shaping the new energy ecosystems.
Assembly of first future wing prototype
To meet increased demands in performance and production rates for the next generation of fuel-efficient aircraft, and to create electric aircraft, we need to be making wings lighter and at lower cost – and producing them around 10 times faster than we do today.
To address this challenge, Airbus created the Wing of Tomorrow programme exploring radical new approaches to the design and manufacture of aircraft wings. The team is investigating the best materials, manufacturing and assembly techniques and new technologies in aerodynamics and wing architecture, drawing together design and manufacturing engineering teams to construct a series of full-scale demonstrators.
This transnational R&T programme has now successfully delivered a first full-size wing prototype or ‘demonstrator’ that will help mature next-generation wing technologies.
The completion of the first of three fully composite wing demonstrators marks the integration of more than 100 different
component and manufacturing technologies that include an all-new industrial assembly system, and which have helped validate key automation targets.
Sabine Klauke, Airbus Chief Technical Officer, said: “Wing of Tomorrow brings a completely different build philosophy to the way we currently assemble wings and is a crucial part of our R&T portfolio that will help us assess the industrial feasibility of wing production in the future.”
The international team behind this UK-led programme is developing high-performing wing technologies, including the incorporation of a folding wing tip. Alongside research into sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) and hydrogen propulsion, Wing of Tomorrow shows how Airbus is contributing to aviation’s decarbonisation ambitions and demonstrates the importance of large-scale industry collaboration in achieving our sector’s agenda for a more sustainable future.
The new build philosophy on Wing of Tomorrow eradicates in-tank working and enables manual and automated assembly to be smoothly integrated into an optimised industrial system. Through capturing the learning from building this first, and subsequent, wing demonstrators, Airbus will explore different scenarios to be able to make the right industrial choices to build our wings of the future.
Wing of Tomorrow composite components are designed to make the best use of technologies and reduce the amount of work during the assembly phase by more than 50 per cent. Automation of the remaining drilling, achieving good tolerance control and wing shape, as well as the introduction of new approaches to inspection and validation, will support Airbus’ ambition to create the most highly efficient wings of the future.
The hydrogen contrail characterisation challenge
Airbus UpNext, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Airbus, revealed a flight test programme at FIA to study the contrails produced by a hydrogen combustion engine as part the company’s ZEROe roadmap. The project, named Blue Condor, will launch two modified Arcus gliders, one equipped with a hydrogen combustion engine and one equipped with a conventional kerosene-powered combustion engine, in order to compare contrails emitted at high altitudes.
“Contrail characterisation is of significant interest to Airbus. We know that hydrogen emits no carbon dioxide when burned, but we also know that with water vapour and heat being the most significant byproducts, hydrogen combustion does produce contrails. Although these contrails differ significantly to those produced by conventional JetA/A1 combustion engines, understanding their composition will be key to support our decarbonisation journey,” said Sandra Bour
Schaeffer, CEO of Airbus UpNext. “In taking up this challenge we are making significant headway in our decarbonisation strategy and our ambition to bring the world’s first zero-emission commercial aircraft into service by 2035.”
Airbus and a number of major airlines have signed letters of intent to explore opportunities for a future supply of carbon removal credits from direct air carbon capture technology.
Direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS) is a high-potential technology that involves filtering and removing CO2 emissions directly from the air using high powered fans. Once removed from the air, the CO2 is safely and permanently stored in geologic reservoirs. As the aviation industry cannot capture CO2 emissions released into the atmosphere at source, a direct air carbon capture and storage solution would allow the sector to extract the equivalent amount of emissions from its operations directly from atmospheric air.
Carbon removals via direct air capture technology complement other solutions that deliver CO2 reductions, such as SAF, by
addressing remaining emissions that cannot be directly eliminated.
As part of the agreements, the airlines have committed to engage in negotiations on the possible pre-purchase of verified and durable carbon removal credits starting in 2025 through to 2028. The carbon removal credits will be issued by Airbus’ partner 1PointFive – a subsidiary of Occidental’s Oxy Low Carbon Ventures business and the global deployment partner of Direct Air Capture company Carbon Engineering. Airbus’ partnership with 1PointFive includes the pre-purchase of 400,000 tonnes of carbon removal credits to be delivered over four years.
“We are already seeing strong interest from airlines to explore affordable and scalable carbon removals,” said Julie Kitcher,
Executive Vice President Communications and Corporate Affairs, Airbus. “These first letters of intent mark a concrete step towards the use of this promising technology for both Airbus’ own decarbonisation plan and the aviation sector’s ambition to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.”