GE Aerospace is working with NASA to make hybrid-electric, high-bypass turbofan engines for the next generation of single-aisle airliners, the company announced on June 19. The work will build upon the partners’ ongoing collaboration on the NASA Electrified Powertrain Flight Demonstration (EPFD) program, which aims to rapidly mature electric propulsion technologies to begin electrifying commercial airline fleets in 2035.
Now GE Aerospace and NASA are working to modify GE’s Passport 20 engine with hybrid-electric components for testing under NASA’s Hybrid Thermally Efficient Core (HyTEC) project, which seeks to reduce fuel burn through the development of small core engine technologies.
“We are taking a Passport 20 engine, modifying it to do power extraction with a voltage generator, and we are actually assembling that engine and we're going to be testing it right now,” GE Aerospace v-p and general manager of engineering Mohamed Ali told reporters during a briefing at the company’s Cincinnati headquarters last week.
Having electric motors embedded into the turbofan engine can provide supplemental power during various phases of flight, and the system works with or without an energy storage system like batteries, according to GE Aerospace. This could help to speed up the adoption of hybrid-electric propulsion systems while the aviation industry awaits improvements in battery technologies that could support larger aircraft flying longer-range missions.
The company has already completed initial component-level testing at its EPISCenter in Dayton, Ohio. It has also tested the performance of the unmodified Passport 20 engine to provide a baseline for comparing the data with that of the modified engine. Those baseline engine tests were completed at GE’s Peebles test facility in Ohio.
GE Aerospace is developing the technology demonstrator as part of the CFM RISE (Revolutionary Innovation for Sustainable Engines) program, which aims to achieve a 20% reduction in carbon dioxide emissions through the development of more efficient propulsion systems and the use of sustainable aviation fuels.
The company has also been working on NASA’s EPFD program since 2021, along with Boeing. For that program, GE is developing a megawatt-class, hybrid-electric powertrain to demonstrate flight readiness for single-aisle aircraft using its own CT7 turboprop engines in a modified Saab 340B testbed. In 2022, the EPFD partners announced that they had successfully tested the hybrid-electric propulsion system in conditions simulating altitudes to 45,000 feet. They are now preparing to fly the system onboard an aircraft for the first time, and the flight readiness review for that mission is already underway, Ali said.