Project Title: Hybrid Electric Aircraft Technology Platform

Location: Hawthorne, CA

Award Amount: $9,000,000

Ampaire Website


ARPA-E Ampaire SCALEUP 2021 Thumbnail


 

Challenge

Aviation is one of the most challenging energy use sectors to decarbonize, and today the commercial deployments of electrified propulsion aircraft are essentially zero. The key common barrier for all development projects is regulatory certification. With ARPA-E support, Ampaire is addressing key maturation issues towards addressing certifiability. For many developers, there remains a large maturation gap between proof-of-concept and pre-commercial solutions that can be pilot scale deployed with potential customers. Furthermore, the newness of electrified propulsion technology complicates the identification and negotiation of acceptable means and methods of regulatory compliance.

Technical Approach

Ampaire has developed—and has been flight testing for several years—multiple generations of the AMP DriveTM suite of hybrid electric propulsion technologies. In this SCALEUP project, Ampaire is advancing the maturity of several key electrified propulsion subsystems to a packaged certifiable hardware and software solution that is validated through testing. Supply chain and in-house commercial intent quality systems will be developed. Verification test methods will be developed and executed to identify and address key remaining certification gaps for the electrified propulsion subsystems.

The overarching end goal is to accelerate successfully obtaining an FAA supplemental type certification for our launch product—the AMP-H570 hybrid electric propulsion unit suitable for nine passenger single powerplant aircraft and larger multi-engine aircraft. The product benefits include achieving fuel and emissions savings on the order of 50%, and up to 100% emissions savings with sustainable aviation fuels (SAF), while at the same time providing 25% operating cost savings, no infrastructure barriers to adoption, and significantly better payload-range characteristics than all electric or hydrogen near term alternatives.

Team

The Ampaire team brings decades of experience from traditional aerospace and defense businesses coupled with expertise in electrified propulsion and power conversion from the electric ground vehicle and renewable power industries. The leadership team’s background includes Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and GE as well as academics from California Institute of Technology, Stanford University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In previous startups and established businesses, the team has developed, commercialized, and supported new state-of-the-art hybrid and fully electric propulsion products for mobility.

ARPA-E Mission Alignment

Ampaire’s AMP DriveTM technology directly supports the fuel and emissions reduction for one of the most challenging sectors to decarbonize. The fuel savings are significant (~50%) and scalable to transport class aircraft. The emissions savings, using SAF, have the potential for up to 100% net emissions reduction. Furthermore, commercialization of Ampaire technology will help grow the domestic product supply chain base in the critical aerospace technology sector.

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