No rest for Clean Aviation as call 4 decision ushers in busy year-end

EU body now has 53 projects on its books, representing some €3.6 billion of research and innovation spending.
You could be forgiven for thinking that Clean Aviation’s leadership might be able to relax a little, the EU research and innovation body on 17 September having announced the 19 industry-led projects selected under its fourth call for proposals.

But not for the first time, Clean Aviation’s team is facing a packed year-end schedule.

In addition to the grant preparation process – the final rubber-stamp of approval for those projects that are set to share a total of €290 million ($326 million) – the public-private undertaking is also deep in the preparation of its fifth and final call, ahead of its launch in February next year.

On top of which, a host of projects from call 1 which commenced in January 2023 are beginning to wrap up, requiring a degree of management time to properly process.

In the background too, there is the lobbying required to shape whatever comes when Clean Aviation itself ends in December 2031.

In other words, things are getting pretty busy.

Including the cohort announced in September, Clean Aviation has 53 projects on its books. These represent some €1.47 billion of EU grants, which when added to private-sector investment, total around €3.6 billion of research and innovation spending.

Linked objectives

Broadly speaking, the organisation has two linked objectives: supporting the development of next-generation technologies to deliver a 30% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions compared to a 2020 state-of-the-art baselines, and ensuring those technologies are sufficiently mature, including on an industrial level, to enter service by 2035.

Those technologies support four aircraft concepts: short and medium-range, or SMR, (a new narrowbody, essentially); an ultra-efficient regional aircraft (a next-generation turboprop); and two different hydrogen-powered aircraft – one with fuel cells and the other using hydrogen-combustion engines.

Clean Aviation’s target is that, through its projects, most of the contributing technologies required by those four concepts will have been raised to technology and certification readiness levels (TRL/CRL) 6 between 2028 and 2030.

If phase 1 (encompassing calls 1 and 2) was about the early stages of technology development, phase 2 – calls 3, 4 and 5 – is much more the business end of the programme, where full-scale demonstrators come to the fore.

Call 3, announced last year, saw 12 projects secure funding, largely in the SMR and hybrid-electric workstreams, while at that point hydrogen was avoided due to changes to the predicted service-entry date.

To make up for that deficit, there is much more emphasis in the latest batch on hydrogen as Clean Aviation looks to address “the rest of the puzzle”, says Sebastien Dubois, head of unit, programme development and communications.

In all, seven hydrogen-related projects have been selected in call 4, including four in the dedicated hydrogen workstream, sharing €101 million of EU funding; comparatively, the four SMR-related projects will share €106 million.

“What is important, and it was acknowledged by our technical committee, is that we need to keep investing in hydrogen technology,” adds Maria Calvo, head of unit project management.

“That’s why the volume that you can see in call four is similar to SMR… because we need to be prepared for entry into service beyond 2035, and we also need to increase the growth capability, not just of the OEMs, but across all the different supply chains.”

MTU-led hybridisation project will build on earlier SWITCH work alongside Collins Aerospace and Pratt & Whitney. Source: Collins Aerospace

Overall, Dubois says Clean Aviation was “very pleased” with both the quality of the submissions under call 4 and the number of participants: there are 180 organisations in those 19 projects, including 74 entities new to the programme.

“Clean Aviation works as a catalyst to embark new entrants and to further develop the ecosystem,” he says.

“And when you look at the funding, we have 42% of that geared towards research organisations, universities, and SMEs – it means that we are starting to build a good innovation chain and also beginning to prepare the future supply chain.”

Calvo cites the number of projects in call 4 that lean on work carried out in the programme’s first phase, what she calls “crossover”.

“Call 4 is not a call in isolation, but is piling up after what we have in the previous calls, [and is] based on the final demonstration and flight-test and full-scale ground demonstrators foreseen in phase two,” she says.

For instance, she cites FARMAN, a project which sees industry heavyweights Safran and Rolls-Royce collaborating on the development and demonstration of a hydrogen distribution system for direct hydrogen combustion aircraft, building on work in the earlier HYDEA and CAVENDISH projects.

“For FARMAN, they are partnering in order to advance the next step of technology further,” she says.
Similarly, Airbus and MTU Aero Engines are collaborating on a project called EHPIC related to fuel cell development, building on their involvement in the earlier HEROPS and FAME projects. In the background, of course, the pair are in the process of forming a joint venture in the same area.

“We see the news about the new joint venture stimulated by getting to know [each other] within our programmes, sharing challenges,” says Calvo.

She thinks that working together within those projects has helped the two companies to develop “the common ground and understanding that getting together can put them in a position to face the challenge in a more robust way”.

Dubois argues that these joint efforts, and others like them, are “typical examples of what a European collaborative project can produce when you are not so high in terms of maturity level”.

On top of which, broader considerations about developing future ecosystems mean there are “common interests in sharing information and potentially defining new common standards”, pushing those, who, like Safran and Rolls-Royce, are more typically seen as competitors, “to work together in the field of the same project”.

Winners and losers

Unfortunately, perhaps, as Clean Aviation has progressed and projects coalesced, there are not only winners from the process.

In its first phase, the body funded three separate fuel cell research projects: FAME, HEROPS and NEWBORN, led respectively by Airbus, MTU and Honeywell Aerospace.

But with finite funding, Clean Aviation could only offer a grant for one such project in the latest call, resulting in Honeywell missing out.

Dubois acknowledges that the process will inevitably cause some disappointment, but says the EHPIC project, led by Airbus and involving MTU, scored better against the assessment criteria.

Nonetheless, he says, “it doesn’

Source: www.flightglobal.com — article syndicated from the publisher’s feed; all rights remain with the original publisher.