Real Time Fuel Tank Health Monitoring for Cryogenic Hydrogen Aviation Fuel

Tech4Imaging (T4I) proposes to develop a real time fuel tank health monitoring system for cryogenic liquid hydrogen (LH2) aviation fuel. This will be accomplished by imaging the fuel distribution in the fuel tank and measuring the total mass of fuel in real time. The measurements will be generated by an Electrical Capacitance Volume Tomography (ECVT) system integrated into a composite vacuum jacketed fuel tank. LH2 fuel tanks pose several challenges to imaging the fuel distribution and measuring the total mass of fuel. While LH2 is extremely cold (20K), highly flammable, prone to boil-off, poses over-pressure hazards, and can easily leak, the primary difficulty when it comes to mass gauging is the highly unpredictable two-phase nature of the fuel in the tank. ECVT is a non-invasive, non-contact measurement modality that relies on low energy electrical signals to interrogate the permittivity of the two-phase mixture in the tank. This project aims at a sensor that can be designed with a tank in various shapes and sizes and will be sold as an integrated unit for installation into an aircraft. The designs can accommodate many fuel systems such as high Lift/Drag wings, Blended Wing Body, conformal tanks, and distributed/embedded propulsion. The primary customers are cryogenic LH2 manufacturers for aviation, particularly those that create non-conductive composite tanks. Adjacent markets include the growing satellite market. The global space-qualified propellant tank market was $1.95B in 2021 with a projected growth to $3.03B in 2030 (straits research).