Performance and environmental analysis of fuel cell based electrical taxiing for aircraft

Airport ground operations have a great impact on the environment. Various innovative solutions have been proposed for aircraft to perform taxi movements by deactivating their main engines. Although these solutions are environmentally beneficial, onboard and external electric taxiing solutions that are actively used and planned to be used in airports are not completely carbon-free. The disadvantages of the existing solutions can be alleviated by using an external fuel cell hybrid power unit to meet the energy required for taxiing that does not put additional weight on the aircraft. In order to reveal the power and energy required by the system, five different aircraft type are discussed in this thesis. To determine the physical requirements of aircraft for taxiing, a total of 900 seconds taxi-out movement consisting of four different periods with different runway slope, headwind, and maximum speeds were examined. According to the physical requirements determined for the narrow body Airbus A320-200 type aircraft, which is frequently used for carrying passengers at airports, the conceptual design of the proposed fuel cell external power unit system was created and the physical data of the system for each period were obtained using the Matlab Simulink environment. As a result of the simulation, it is seen that the system consumes maximum 2.23 grams of hydrogen per second. In addition, it has been calculated that 578.34 kg of CO2 is emitted during the taxi-out movement. The results also show that as a result of using the proposed system, approximately 14.6 million tons of CO2 emission per year can be prevented.