A Novel Hydrogen-Based Thermal Management System for an Electric Helicopter

To date, all-electric rotorcrafts with single rotor have still struggled to remain competitive with their conventional counterparts. The powertrain study presented in this paper uses hydrogen as a fuel and coolant in combination with a hyper-conductive electric machine, enabling a more conventional design approach – in this case, an Airbus H135 helicopter used by mountain rescue. Since thermal management is critical to the functionality of the powertrain, the hydrogen flow configuration was chosen to allow a maximum degree of freedom. The resulting fluid circuit is presented and investigated in a simulation.