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‘Ironically’ is probably not the right word to describe the lack of public information about Sergey Brin’s airship company. Who knows, it’s worth staying private as one of the co – creators of a search engine that’s changed the world? But for those who know where to look – like an eagle-eyed journalist Mark Hughes – details of LTA’s plans have made it public. Hughes saw a rather revealing job at the company for someone to run a hydrogen fuel cell program.
The very interesting part of the job appears in the list of primary responsibilities:
Engineering fuel cell propulsion system through configuration of 1.5MW airship propulsion system, including H2 storage, fuel cells, H2O intake, batteries, stern, and smaller electric motors and gears, and adaptation of 750KW fuel cell system on existing airship
Yes, you read that right, LTA is indeed working on configuring a 1.5 MW fuel cell system. The context is that the hydrogen fuel cell that drives the Toyota Mirai was pushed from 113 kW to 128 kW in November, making it ten times less powerful than the system sought by LTA. Even the 500 kW Class 8 tractor trailers that Toyota tests as garbage trucks in the ports of LA and Long Beach use only a few Mirai fuel cell systems to generate power, and the most powerful hydrogen fuel cell in the air so far is a fuel cell of 250 kW in the ZeroAvia ZA-600, a 20-seat aircraft with a range of 800 km.
Normally, megawatts of fuel cells require electrolytes of molten carbonate or solid oxide, but they operate at extremely high temperatures (500 (C to 1000˚C) and are much better suited for stationary applications, but LTA is not the only airline operating with a hydrogen fuel cell is not trying to reach 1.5 MW.In January, the German Aviation Center (German Center for Aerospace, or DLR), was awarded a $ 31 million (26 million euro) grant to develop a similar system, which he said would be ‘enough to accommodate a 40 to 60-seat regional aircraft with a range of 1,000 kilometers to develop. ‘
It certainly sounds useful if you, like LTA, are planning to build airships for humanitarian missions.