Development of a model to describe the performance of a hydrogen-fueled turboshaft engine

The continuous expansion of the aerospace sector with consequent restrictions from the perspective of greenhouse gas emissions are pushing the industry to invest in energy sources other than fossil fuels. In this scenario, hydrogen appears to be a promising and viable way forward. The use of hydrogen as an aviation fuel has tremendous environmental benefits over current systems, eliminating carbon monoxide (CO), carbon dioxide (CO2), sulfur oxides (SOx), unburnt hydro-carbons (UHC), and smoke. The impact of NOx as a greenhouse gas is well known and steps can be taken to minimize these emissions in hydrogen gas turbine engines. This paper analyzes the performance of a hydrogen-fueled Allison 250 C-18 turboshaft engine and reports a comparison with the performance obtained by burning kerosene. First, a description of the Simulink model used to simulate the engine performance is presented. The proposed model was built using a 0-D modeling approach, whereby all equations are space-independent and only time dependence was considered. The model was then validated so that it faithfully predicts the performance of the engine. Finally, hydrogen conversion was implemented to study and compare the performance. Several simulations were performed to study the behavior of the model under different operating conditions.