Conceptual design methodology for low-supersonic LH2-powered passengers aircraft

Commercial aviation domain has always been characterized by a constant technological evolution, featuring different progress slopes depending on the historical period, but still focused on the development of more efficient and competitive products. More recently, the concept of competitiveness has changed, moving from a pure performance standpoint to a wider concept, encompassing economic viability and environmental sustainability. The latter is crucial and cannot be neglected anymore, even for a sector that is contributing to manmade CO2 emissions only by 2-4%. The need to assess the overall product lifecycle in terms of environment compatibility is thus influencing new design for conventional aircraft, with particular focus on Sustainable Aviation Fuels (SAF) and hydrogen. However, this shall not limit technological progress, which is basically stuck around jet airliners configuration concepts originally developed around 1950s. As a matter of fact, still maintaining the need of environmental compatibility, supersonic and, in general, high-speed aviation has regained momentum in terms of research efforts and funding, after some period characterized by highs and lows since the withdrawn from service of the Concorde. This paper aims at evaluating the possibility of designing a liquid hydrogen-powered aircraft aimed at passengers transportation, flying in low supersonic regime along trans-Atlantic routes, with particular focus on the feasibility of Concorde-like configurations modified to host liquid hydrogen on-board. Particularly, a conceptual design methodology is described and results are discussed to highlight limitations of such kind of aircraft layout, when non drop-in fuels are exploited.