VerdeGo Aero Announces “Unveiling of VH-4T 400kW Turbine Hybrid-Electric Powerplant” 

VerdeGo Aero, a com­pa­ny that aims to “rev­o­lu­tionise aero­space tech­nolo­gies with cut­ting-edge propul­sion solu­tions” is to unveil its VH-4T tur­bine hybrid-elec­tric pow­er­plant, reports a press release. The 400kW pow­er­plant is designed to address a wide array of appli­ca­tions in high-per­for­mance elec­tri­fied air­craft for com­mer­cial and mil­i­tary mar­kets.

Found­ed in 2017, U.S‑based VerdeGo has lever­aged the pre­vi­ous sev­en years of hybrid-elec­tric devel­op­ment, includ­ing the expe­ri­ence from build­ing its 185kW VH‑3 pro­gram, to cre­ate the VH-4T. 

Full-scale Iron Bird test­ing of the VH-4T began in late 2023, and a flight­wor­thy pro­to­type is the sub­ject of a cur­rent USAF Small Busi­ness Inno­va­tion Research Phase II effort for AFWERX. 

VerdeGo Aero Award­ed NASA Con­tract to advance hybrid-elec­tric pow­er­plant

Eric Bartsch, CEO of VerdeGo Aero, com­ment­ed, “We are excit­ed to expand our hybrid-elec­tric pow­er­plant port­fo­lio up to the 400kW pow­er lev­el. This rev­o­lu­tion­ary pow­er­plant enables drones, VTOL and CTOL elec­tri­fied air­craft to achieve high­er lev­els of per­for­mance and mis­sion capa­bil­i­ty.” 

David Eich­st­edt, VerdeGo’s VP of Prod­uct Man­age­ment, added, “We are see­ing strong mar­ket demand across a vari­ety of new elec­tric air­craft con­fig­u­ra­tions 400 kW seems to be a sweet spot for 5–7 pas­sen­ger air taxis, eCTOL or eSTOL air­craft that car­ry up to about 9 pas­sen­gers, as well as car­go drones that need to car­ry over 1000 lb of pay­load.” 

The release states, “VerdeGo is col­lab­o­rat­ing with Pratt & Whit­ney to use the PW206/PW207 engine series in the VH-4T hybrid. As a high­ly effi­cient and reli­able engine fam­i­ly, the PW200 is well suit­ed for hybrid-elec­tric con­fig­u­ra­tions, with over 17 mil­lion hours of oper­a­tion accrued by more than 6,700 engines pro­duced to date. The VH-4T pro­gram con­tin­ues RTX’s col­lab­o­ra­tion with VerdeGo Aero, which start­ed through RTX Ven­tures’ invest­ment in VerdeGo Aero in mid-2022.” 

Scott McEl­vaine, VP of Pratt & Whit­ney, Cana­da, remarked, “Hybrid-elec­tric propul­sion has the poten­tial to enable improve­ments in per­for­mance and fuel effi­cien­cy for a wide array of future air­craft appli­ca­tions. Our part­ner­ship with VerdeGo is help­ing to accel­er­ate the appli­ca­tion of this tech­nol­o­gy, which we are also advanc­ing across mul­ti­ple RTX demon­stra­tor pro­grams.”

VerdeGo Aero Team at the AERO Friedrichshafen Event in May

VerdeGo’s hybrid pow­er­plants are tight­ly inte­grat­ed sys­tems that include the engine, gen­er­a­tor, pow­er elec­tron­ic, con­trol sys­tems, ther­mal man­age­ment and mechan­i­cal inte­gra­tion, to cre­ate a new type of pow­er­plant for elec­tri­fied air­craft. 

A VH-4T pro­to­type will be on dis­play in the AFWERX booth 439 at the Exper­i­men­tal Air­craft Asso­ci­a­tion Air­Ven­ture show in Oshkosh (July 22nd to 28th). VerdeGo will also be attend­ing the Farn­bor­ough Air­show (July 22nd-26th) at chalet num­ber D020. 

For more infor­ma­tion

https://www.verdegoaero.com

(Top image: VerdeGo Aero VH-4T tur­bine hybrid-elec­tric pow­er­plant)

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