Oxford Thermofluids Institute | Research - Research Themes: Sustainable Aviation

Climate change poses a challenge to all industries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and move towards net-zero emissions. The aviation industry has long been engaged in increasing the efficiency of conventional aero-engines, and the Institute continues to be an active participant in such research. However, the Institute is also very much engaged in research that relies on fundamental changes to propulsion architectures to drastically reduce carbon emissions and more rapidly move towards a net-zero system.

Among such areas of research include:

• Hydrogen based propulsion systems including hydrogen combustion and fuel-cell based architectures.
• Carbon capture technologies to actively remove carbon dioxide from the area that can be stored or used in industries.
• Challenges around significant changes to current architectures such as the addition of a gearbox to turbofan jet engines.

All these areas of research entail significant challenges that researchers at the OTI along with our industry partners, are engaged in addressing.