Superconductors: A Path to Sustainable Flight

Working several in a row on each wing of an Boeing 737, they would supply enough electric power to propel the plane down the tarmac, then lift it about 30,000 feet in the air – all with near-perfect energy efficiency, and all without releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

That is the Raytheon Technologies Research Center's vision for a superconducting electric aircraft motor, a project its researchers are pursuing alongside a team of academic and commercial partners through a contract with the U.S. Department of Energy Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA-E.

Under the contract, the research center is working on a conceptual design for a 2.5-megawatt, 5,000-rpm fully superconducting motor and its drive for electric aircraft propulsion. Joining in the effort will be colleagues from the University of Tennessee, Hyper Tech Research Inc., the Ohio State University and Pacific Northwest National Labs.

Though the motor they build will be tested at only 260 kilowatts – a fraction of its 2.5 megawatt capacity – it would serve as a valuable prototype for a system that could one day power single-aisle aircraft such as the 737.

"This is very ambitious," said Parag Kshirsagar, the Raytheon Technologies Research Center's principal investigator for the project. "It is a very hard problem, but we wanted to be among the first to take on the development of a fully superconducting aerospace-grade motor. It has great promise and great reward."

The goal, according to the Department of Energy, is to "mitigate the growing environmental burden associated with commercial air travel at minimum economic cost," and the project is among many ways engineers across Raytheon Technologies are pursuing sustainability in aviation. In addition to the superconducting motor, they're building more efficient versions of current engines, exploring the use of novel and sustainable aviation fuels and developing hybrid electric propulsion – all to help meet an industry goal of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.

"It's all about clean skies, where aviation doesn't contribute to climate change,” said Andreas Roelofs, the Raytheon Technologies Research Center's director. "The electrification of flight is a promising path to achieving that goal."

A fully electric superconducting motor would bring dramatic improvements in efficiency and power density, he said, and it would represent "kind of the end stage – as clean as you can get, as sophisticated as you can get."