Collins Aerospace, an RTX business, today announced the European Union's Clean Aviation HECATE project has achieved Preliminary Design Review (PDR). The HECATE consortium is comprised of multiple European aerospace industry partners, including Collins, Safran, Airbus Defence and Space, Leonardo and several universities. Collins, through its Applied Research & Technology organization and Power & Controls business, leads the project's steering committee, while Safran serves as technical coordinator.

HECATE, which stands for Hybrid-ElectriC regional Aircraft distribution TEchnologies, has accomplished a number of milestones toward its ultimate goal of demonstrating a 500kW hybrid-electric architecture in ground tests at TRL5 by 2025. In cooperation with the consortium partners, Collins has achieved PDR for the project's power conversion and secondary distribution systems, while Safran has achieved PDR for the primary distribution, power management systems and cabling. Airbus Defence & Space and Leonardo continue to provide the airframer perspective, supporting requirements and validation activities. All top-level project requirements, including the electrical distribution architecture, have been defined and the program is on track to achieve TRL4 and Critical Design Review by year's end.

"Hybrid-electric aircraft are a central pillar of the aviation industry's drive to reduce carbon emissions, yet in order for these aircraft to fly, they will require new distribution technologies that can support significantly higher voltages," said Mauro Atalla, senior vice president, Engineering & Technology for Collins. "Working together with our HECATE consortium partners, we're breaking new ground in the maturation of these critical, enabling technologies and progressing on schedule. Public-private partnerships like Clean Aviation are essential to bringing new, sustainable aviation technologies to market, and we look forward to flight testing HECATE under a potential Clean Aviation Phase 2 program."

"HECATE, targeting to develop a novel power distribution network, is at the core of a future hybrid-electric aircraft development where significantly higher voltages and electrical power have to be managed compared to conventional aircraft," said Costin-Ciprian Miglan, project officer for HECATE at Clean Aviation. "The project has achieved a very important milestone with the preliminary design reviews successfully passed for all primary and secondary distribution key sub-systems. This tremendous work is the result of the proactive cooperation of 37 partners across 10 European countries."

This work was funded by UK Research and Innovation under the UK government's Horizon Europe funding guarantee.