Turbotech has delivered what it claims is the first viable hydrogen-fuelled turbine engine for small-scale passenger aircraft, VTOLs and drones, with support from the Ansys simulation platform. The work took place under the BeautHyFuel project, backed by the French Civil Aviation Authority, with support from Elixir Aircraft, Safran, Air Liquide and Daher.

Most hydrogen-based turbine designs struggle to balance combustion with long-term durability and emissions control. Turbotech instead opted for a scalable, fuel-agnostic approach, allowing easier adaptation to hydrogen using Ansys simulation tools.

Through this approach, it identified two nozzle designs for real-world testing and ran high-fidelity simulations using Fluent. These helped define flame shape and temperature distribution. After a 30-hour burn, both nozzles retained nearly full structural integrity and the turbine did not raise emissions output.

Simulation also helped the team avoid the need for traditional cluster-based computing. Ansys tools were deployed on local boosted workstations to enable combustion modelling.

The turbine was developed following earlier work through the Ansys Startup Program, where Turbotech created a regenerative turbine architecture now adapted for hydrogen use.

“Turbotech’s goal is to bring a built-in, deeply integrated solution to the light aviation market that reduces carbon emissions and empowers pilots to focus solely on flying,” says Turbotech chief technology officer Guillaume Malet. “The reliability of Ansys helped us tremendously throughout the redesign, successfully allowing us to retrofit the turbine for hydrogen on a much shorter timeline.”

Ansys’ Walt Hearn adds: “This first-pass success was made possible not only by Turbotech’s expert engineers and their deep understanding of complex multiphysics, but by Ansys’ strong technical support across all phases of the project.”