The Storage, Delivery and Thermal Recovery System for a Total Air Liquefaction System for Oxygen and Nitrogen (TALON)

Current military aircraft oxygen supply systems are suboptimal in that they require a great deal of logistical support, do not provide a sufficient oxygen purity level for all applications, do not respond well to varying demand, are coupled directly to the engine bleed air supply, and/or present significant safety hazards. Similarly, existing fuel tank inerting systems employing molecular sieves to produce Nitrogen Enriched Air (NEA) do not produce NEA at a sufficient rate or provide for realiable operation. The opportunity is to eliminate the problems associated with these two sybsystems by developing an onboard Total Air Liquefaction System for Oxygen and Nitrogen (TALON). This system consists of a cryogenic refrigerator and two compact, lightweight, flightworthy distillation columns that provide supplies of liquid oxygen (LOX) and liquid NEA (LNEA) to several onboard dewars. Through design and hardware demonstrations of the core distillation technology, we have shown that the TALON system potentially provides many benefits to military aircraft. In the proposed Phase II project, we will demonstrate key ancillary elements ofd the proposed system including an innovative method to achieve thermal recoovery critical to efficient operation, a tilt correction scheme, and the LOX/LNEA storage and delivery systems.