26 July 2022
Engineers & CAD Designers: Fuel of the Future (Don’t Let It Stink!)
If you’re something of a bad*ss, maybe you’ve woken up (to a predictably rough day at work), thrown back the covers and growled, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.” But has anyone ever professed a fondness for the distinctive cat-pee smell of ammonia? We think not. However, someone had better come up with something — pretty darn quick — because unless they do, the future of aviation is doomed to smell like, well, urine (unless some genius aerospace engineer or CAD designer figures out a workaround).
We know you have a lot on your plate, and we promise we’ll get to a solution to help reduce your time spent at the office, but we have a request: If you work with jet engines, internal combustion engines, or anything that helps put aircraft in the sky, please hear our plea. We understand that ammonia is the most likely candidate as the future fuel of the aviation industry, but could you please engineer it so that our skies don’t smell like the men's room at an overcrowded pub on a Friday night?
Please engineer it so that our skies don’t smell like the men's room at an overcrowded pub on a Friday night.
A Tale of Two Gases
Depending on how many trips around the sun you’ve celebrated, you may recall when “unleaded” signs started showing up at gas pumps.
Automotive gas originally contained lead to help reduce engine knocking, boost octane ratings, and help with wear and tear on valve seats within the motor. However, with growing concerns such as health risks and air pollution, combined with the fact that leaded fuel tended to foul catalytic converters, the US began phasing out leaded gas in the late 1970s and banned it altogether in all on-road vehicles in 1995.
Lead, however, was never removed from aviation gas (known as avgas) since it actively helps lubricate the engine, and a suitable alternative had not been found.
Per the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, “When emitted from aircraft exhaust, lead can be inhaled by people living near and working at airports. Lead exposures also can occur from exhaust deposited on soil and other surfaces, spills and vapor emitted during refueling, and contact with residue left on aircraft engines and other components. Even at low exposures, as measured by blood lead levels, lead has been linked to effects such as decreased cognitive performance in children.”
Professor and Head of the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Pennsylvania State University, Amy R. Pritchett, explains, “Because there is no known safe level of lead in the blood, there is a compelling reason to reduce or eliminate lead emissions...”
Clearly, lead has got to go.
The push for alternative fuels has resulted in the creation of various types of biofuels, such as biokerosene (made from algae or plant oils), to replace traditional petroleum-based jet fuels, but sometimes the manufacture of fossil-fuel alternatives comes with a heavy carbon footprint. However, one of the most promising options on the horizon comes from, you guessed it, good old stinky cat-pee ammonia.
There is no known safe level of lead in the blood . . . — Prof. Amy R. Pritchett, Department of Aerospace Engineering, Pennsylvania State University
Thunder From Down Under
Your grandparents may have used ammonia to achieve a streak-free shine on their windows or to restore their driveway to like-new condition, but ammonia is apparently capable of much more. In fact, a couple of Aussie blokes are betting they’ll put a nine-seat ammonia-fueled passenger jet in the air by mid-2023. We weren’t sure what was fueling their fighting talk, so we dug a little deeper.
Brothers Christof and Helmut Mayer, directors of Aviation H2, have zeroed in on ammonia’s potential as a combustion fuel. Of all the potential avgas replacement fuels, ammonia requires the simplest engine conversions, which also makes it very reliable. According to Christof, “That, in itself, makes it intrinsically the safest.”
A regular jet engine can be converted to run on ammonia, eliminating all its carbon dioxide emissions. It will be faster and cheaper than a hydrogen fuel cell conversion as it doesn’t require relegating perfectly good turbofan engines to the scrap heap only to replace them with all-new electric motors. To add to the cost-effectiveness, there would also be no need to completely remove your fuel storage system and replace it with something radically different.
“We need to modify the fuel storage system into something that’s basically similar to an LPG tank,” says Mayer. “So, it’s the fuel storage, the engine control, and the engine, those are the big-ticket items that we need to develop. But we’re not really changing the design of the engine much at all, physically.”
The issue of emissions will, of course, come under scrutiny. Ammonia combustion potentially creates environmentally harmful nitrous oxides. “But we can control those by special processes,” Mayer explains. “We don’t just squirt ammonia in there and burn. There’s certain things we have to do to it, certain controls we have to put in place inside the fuel control system.”
The test flight in 2023 will most likely be in a Dassault Falcon 50 business jet, which has three engines but can run on only two.
Of all the potential avgas replacement fuels, ammonia requires the simplest engine conversions.
Ammonia: Odiferous Lifeblood of the Future?
You may think of ammonia primarily as a cleaning solution or a component of fertilizer, and you’d be right. The truth is that very little food we eat today would make it to our plates without ammonia.
A hundred years ago, as the global population began to boom, farmers were forced to raise crops faster than the nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the soil could keep up. Two German chemists, Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, figured out how to react hydrogen and atmospheric nitrogen — under pressure — to make ammonia, which farmers could use in place of natural fertilizers. A century later, the Haber-Bosch process still produces virtually all the world’s ammonia.
Now, a hundred years later, ammonia could once again come to the rescue by capturing, storing, and shipping hydrogen for use in emission-free fuel cells and turbines, in addition to its above-mentioned use in combustion engines. Furthermore, thanks to a century of use in agriculture, a vast ammonia infrastructure already exists. Approximately 180 million metric tons of ammonia are produced annually, worldwide, and 120 ports are already equipped with ammonia terminals.
While experts agree that ammonia may not be the perfect, long-term solution when scrutinized against issues such as carbon emissions from its manufacture and transport, sustainability, or whether it will ever be a fuel with zero emissions or zero harmful emissions, it certainly seems to be a better (and cheaper) immediate solution to the fuel crisis.
We’re just hoping that the world doesn’t end up smelling like a giant litterbox.
Helping You Help the World
At Axiom, we believe that it’s the architects, engineers and CAD professionals who ultimately conceive of and build our futures. And we believe that you deserve some support.
Whether you’re a MicroStation®, Revit® or AutoCAD® professional, we know that your platform has its quirks and that those quirks generally amount to unnecessary time spent on repetitive tasks, thereby increasing frustration and reducing productivity. And frankly, if you’re the guy designing our future, we’d prefer it if you weren’t frustrated or uninspired.
As a MicroStation user, what if you could have perfectly flawless formatting with Word and Excel imports, every time? Or the ability to make unlimited changes to multiple design files quickly? Or, or, or ... See the variety of available MicroStation tools here.
If you’re a Revit pro, we feel your pain when it comes to imports, especially PDFs. Please tell us you’re not still importing them one page at a time. There’s no need for you to be spending your valuable time on something so menial. Find out more here.
For you, the AutoCAD professional, we know that not only can the formatting of your imports test the patience of a saint, but that changes to title block attribute text or conversions between DGNs and DWGs can be enough to make you want to flee the office. But we need you, designing our future, and we’d like to offer you some support here.
If you’re the guy designing our future, we’d prefer it if you weren’t frustrated or uninspired.
Of course, if you’d like to pick the brain of a knowledgeable Service Consultant to help determine exactly which tool is right for you, feel free to call us at 727-442-7774 or visit AxiomInt.com.
Just please, please don’t let the world smell like cat pee.