Overview
The steady growth of global air traffic passenger demand requires the air transport industry to work even harder to improve the associated levels of safety, efficiency, and environmental performances of aircrafts. As such, the transition to more electrified aircraft systems is strongly encouraged throughout the complete aircraft operational behaviour, including on-ground operations. Indeed, on-ground operations are still mostly engine-based - the main engines designed for flight phases at high power levels are thus used as well as a power source to move the aircraft on the ground.
This induces major economic and environmental losses: currently, fuel consumption from taxi operations is estimated to cost €6.4billion and to reach 18M metric tons of CO2 emission per year. To reduce unnecessary fuel burn and their related emissions, a technological alternative has already been identified: Electric Taxiing System (e-Taxiing). However, some technical bottlenecks, such as the one dealing with the solution storage energy capacity, have still to be overcome before enabling the system to be used by all existing and future commercial aircrafts.
SUNSET will target this specific technical challenge, and proposes a high performance energy storage module development connected to the future e-Taxiing system. The SUNSET technology will also address the related challenge of mass reduction by providing a high-density energy recovery capability (30Wh/kg) to perform aircraft electrical decelerations while also minimising cooling and weight.
SUNSET partners, Centum Adeneo and Ampère Laboratory (UCBL) are part of the European recognised air industry value chain and will as such be involved in both development of the SUNSET solution with their Topic Manager support for its integration in the e-Taxiing system. The SUNSET project will therefore contribute to bringing out an innovative solution which enables a winning differentiator for European aircraft manufacturers.