UK – Patent – Recent Aerospace Innovation Trends And Jet Zero

For those who read my recent article which discussed the value of the
aerospace sector to the UK economy, you will know that there are
certainly green shoots of recovery in the sector after the trials
of the pandemic.

As a follow-up to that, I was interested to see what sort of
impact the pandemic had on innovation in the aerospace
sector. To this end, we ran some searches on data for published
patent applications in the aerospace sector (specifically, on
aeroplanes and helicopters) to build a picture of innovation
levels. As patent applications are filed by companies to protect
new and useful technological developments, they can give us an idea
of innovation levels and R&D efforts for a particular sector.
The patent office where the application has been filed assigns the
application a specific code according to its technical area, and we
can use them to see how many patent applications have been
published in that field.

The results of our searches are shown in the graph below. The
trend lines show raw number of patent applications (in blue) and
number of patent families (in orange). Patents are territorial
rights, and often a company will file several applications in
different countries for the same invention. These can be grouped
into patent families. So, looking at numbers of patent families
(the orange line) can often give a better idea of innovation
levels.

We can see that the numbers peaked in 2019 (blue) and 2021
(orange) and have been on a downward trend since then. At first
sight, one could conclude that the pandemic has been the cause of
these downward trends and numbers are yet to recover. Whilst that
seems broadly correct, two things should be borne in mind about
these numbers:

• For both curves there was a slight levelling off from
  2018-2019, which seems to indicate the slowdown started
  pre-pandemic;




• We have only numbers for the first half of 2024.

On bullet point 2, if we extend the figures from the first half
of 2024 over the full year, the numbers show levelling or even a
slight increase over 2023. So, as with the numbers from my previous
article, there do seem to be signs of recovery in innovation levels
in the aerospace sector too, which is great to see.

What about carbon emissions?

One of the biggest focusses for companies in coming years is of
course carbon emissions reduction, and much of this innovation will
be geared towards that. In particular, the industry is wrestling
with the challenge of how to achieve the ambitious net zero target
on carbon emissions by 2050 set under the government’s Jet Zero
Strategy. As one of the largest carbon emitting industries in the
UK (international and domestic flights accounting for 8% of the
country’s emissions in 2019) much needs to be done on reducing
those emissions if we are to reach the target.

And much effort is being expended to try to reduce aerospace
emissions, but it is proving a hard nut to crack. Road transport
and rail lend themselves more easily to electrification than the
aerospace industry, where weight and power density is so critical,
particularly for medium and long-haul flights. Electrification of
short-haul aviation is more viable, and recent reports suggest that
investment into development of short-haul eVTOLs dwarfs investment
into decarbonisation of other forms of aviation. (This is probably
due to the greater viability of short-haul electrification but also
because most users of eVTOLs will be private jet owners so
there’s a big pool of money to invest.)

Sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) is having some impact on carbon
emissions reduction but it is currently about 4 times as expensive
as ordinary jet fuel, and at present it is difficult to see how
that can change very much. Considering that fuel is by far an
airline’s biggest cost, this is significant. Unfortunately,
some commentators think there are no real alternatives to SAF till
2040 for medium and long-haul flights, and those flights produce
67% of the emissions.

Hydrogen and ammonia are seen by many to be a serious part of
the solution. Hydrogen has had particular interest from UK
companies, and now a UK-based company – Polar Technology
– has achieved a class-leading solution for hydrogen storage
that it claims will triple the range of unmanned air vehicles
(UAVs). Hydrogen’s very low density and Houdini-like ability to
escape from containers have proved especially challenging in
reducing the hydrogen-based concepts to practice. The company will
be showcasing at Farnborough its new storage solution which uses
extremely thin wall liners to achieve 350bar pressure in the
cylinder to give the UAV its huge range advantage. Whilst these
cylinders are currently envisaged for small UAVs, if it can be
scaled up to storage hydrogen for short- or even medium-haul
aircraft it could make a real difference to their viability.

Compared to hydrogen, ammonia has the advantage of being liquid
a room temperature giving it a much higher energy density than
hydrogen. Ammonia is, however, a very corrosive material making it
hard to handle safely.

There are clearly many different propulsion sources in the
running, and for the foreseeable future it seems certain that no
one source will dominate; the solution will need to be a blend of
SAF, hydrogen, electrical and other forms of propulsion.

Conclusion

It is good to see signs of recovery of innovation levels in the
sector after big drops over the pandemic, and I look forward to
seeing that ingenuity employed to meet the mountainous net zero
targets ahead.

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