Site items in: Ammonia Aviation

Sunborne reborn!
Presentation

Despite successfully demonstrating 56kW of controlled combustion of partially cracked ammonia in October 2023, Sunborne Systems was unable to secure Series A funding at the beginning of 2024. Since then, the co-founders have secured UK government funding to tackle two of the challenges set out for Series A funding: to further develop their patented catalysts and to address issues associated with ammonia slippage and NOx emissions. Future opportunities will be discussed.

Ammonia as a liquid for the future of aviation
Presentation

Zero-emission aviation initiatives have mainly focused on using hydrogen or drop-in biofuels and sustainable aviation fuels (SAF) to replace fossil-based jet fuels to achieve near-term reductions in carbon emissions with minimal impacts on the global aircraft fleet and supporting infrastructure. Despite significant advances in the production of such fuels, scaling up manufacturing capability to be cost-competitive remains a challenge. This paper discusses ammonia as a carrier of green hydrogen for aviation, with near-zero emission. Ammonia is proposed as both a carrier of hydrogen as fuel and to provide cooling for compressor intercooling and cooled cooling air for core efficiency improvement,…

Sunborne Systems: bringing keystone technologies to market for the global zero-carbon energy infrastructure
Presentation

At Sunborne Systems, we are developing zero-carbon ammonia-based solutions for heavy transport and high-energy industrial applications. Our keystone technologies are initially focussed on early opportunities in the maritime industry and have high disruption potential across multiple other hard-to-abate sectors. Sunborne Systems was announced a year ago at COP26 in Glasgow and is a joint venture technology company formed by STFC, Reaction Engines and IP Group building upon the technical strengths of Reaction Engines and STFC in thermal management and catalyst chemistry and their in-common expertise in system design and optimisation.

NASA, Boeing, UCF to study zero-carbon ammonia jet fuel
Article

A $10 million, five-year NASA University Leadership Initiative grant will allow an academic-industry team to develop new ammonia-fed jet engines. Researchers at the University of Central Florida will lead a team including collaborators from Georgia Tech, Purdue University, GE and Boeing. The proposed design uses liquid ammonia fuel, which is cracked to release hydrogen, which will be burned by the engine. The team is using the Boeing 737-8 aircraft as a baseline for the design.

Fortescue Future Industries powers ahead on green ammonia
Article

Fortescue Future Industries has been hitting the Ammonia Energy headlines of late. All of these various announcements point towards a singular target, announced in June by Fortescue Chairman Andrew Forrest: the supply of 15 million tonnes green hydrogen to global markets by 2030. Taken on their own these are significant steps, but COP26 was also the stage for a number of other significant ammonia and hydrogen-related announcements by FFI. Over the last fortnight we've seen the launch of green ammonia production projects in Papua New Guinea, Jordan & Argentina, buyers announced for a full 10% of FFI's global green hydrogen production, a partnership to decarbonise aviation and more developments in the electrolyser space.

New UK joint venture for lightweight, modular ammonia crackers
Article

Reaction Engines, IP Group, and the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) launched a new joint venture this week at COP26 in Glasgow. The group will design and commercialise lightweight, modular ammonia cracking reactors to enable the use of ammonia in hard-to-decarbonise sectors, particularly aviation, shipping and off-grid power generation applications. The design will feature Reaction Engines’ heat exchanger technology developed for its SABRE™ air-breathing rocket engine. In this setup, exhaust heat is utilised to partially crack ammonia back into a fuel blend that "mimics" jet fuel. STFC will lead development of the cracking catalyst, with funding to be provided by IP Group.

Zero emission aircraft: ammonia for aviation
Article

This week, Reaction Engines announced a “ground-breaking study” on ammonia as a fuel for zero-emission aircraft. This will soon be followed by a demonstration project, “integrating the technology into a ground-based test engine.” The study combines Reaction Engines’ heat exchanger technology with the ammonia cracking technology being developed by the UK’s Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). By partially cracking green ammonia to hydrogen, the resulting ammonia fuel mix “mimics jet fuel,” making it possible to adapt existing engines and aircraft to use zero-emission fuels. “This means a fast transition to a sustainable aviation future is possible at low cost.”