Peregrine falcon inspires hydrogen aircraft engine heat exchanger fins
Peregrine falcon inspires hydrogen aircraft engine heat exchanger fins lead image
The global economy is gradually shifting to clean energy in an effort to replace fossil fuels. One of the most challenging sectors to make this switch is aviation, which cannot rely on the same battery technology employed by the automotive industry. Instead, aircraft will likely need to employ more energy-dense fuels like hydrogen, which will require designing new aeroengines to convert this fuel into thrust.
A key component of any hydrogen aeroengine is the heat exchanger, which regulates the flow of thermal energy between the air and the hydrogen propellant. Zheng et al. designed a fin for this heat exchanger using a design inspired by the wing of a peregrine falcon.
“The peregrine falcon features the fastest known flight and dive speeds of any bird in nature, and the unique aerodynamic structure of the wing allows for low resistance during flight,” said author Wenlei Lian.
Using numerical modeling, the team designed their fin using the same streamlined falcon wing shape. In simulations, they determined that the wing generates localized strong vortices that reduce flow resistance while maintaining a strong heat transfer performance. They found their design reduced pressure drop per unit length by up to 18.2% and decreased the friction factor by up to 10.7% in unsteady and turbulent unsteady flows.
Following this success, the researchers will continue developing and testing their designs in increasingly integrated systems.
“In the next step, we plan to build a supercritical hydrogen-based microchannel heat exchanger flow and heat transfer experimental system,” said Lian. “Based on this, we will proceed with the design and manufacture of entire high-performance heat exchangers.”
Source: “Flow and heat transfer performance of hydrogen in printed circuit heat exchanger based on Peregrine Falcon bionic fins,” by Chenming Zheng, Zhiwei Wu, Yuanbo Liu, Yimin Li, and Wenlei Lian, Physics of Fluids (2025). The article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0287964 .
