Storage of hydrogen fuel on aircraft
I hope that this is the right forum - if not please move.
I have recently read a lot about the use of hydrogen to replace jet fuels. I suspect that bio fuels will be the way forward but to work the cost needs to reduce dramatically and if it doesn;t we may be stuck with hydrogen. There are basically three ways of storing hydrogen
- compression, which requires large and heavy tanks
- cryogenically
- interstitialy - the hydrogen reacts with another substance and can be released as required (in the same way that I believe butane can be dissolved in acetone but I'm certainly not an expert so may be wrong).
Can any experts here let me know which they think would be the most effective for long haul flights. I am particularly interested in cryogenic storage. This was famously used for the second and third stages of the Saturn V rocket. Fuelling them was a major task and a lot of hydrogen boiled off and was lost. You could see a lot of ice, formed by condensation, falling off the rocket on take off. This I would imagine would preclude its use in wing tanks so you would need tanks at the front and rear of the fuselage. I also read somewhere that a lot of hydrogen boiled off and that for this reason the third stage could only manage two and a half orbits (one more than was planned) before the trans lunar insertion had to be abandoned.
What are your thoughts on whether hydrogen can be used as a fuel?
As a matter of interest how was the hydrogen in the Apollo service module used for fuel cells stored and were there problems with losses en route?