Newly crowned British monarch King Charles III broke ground May 9 on a new UK research facility designed to dramatically accelerate the pace of aerospace technology development targeting zero-carbon aviation. 

Backed by £58 million ($73 million) in funding, the new Whittle Laboratory at the University of Cambridge will co-locate researchers, students, companies, and entrepreneurs alongside “make space” and manufacturing areas. The lab, which is expected to be opened in October 2025, will also incorporate the National Center for Propulsion and Power—a state-of-the-art rapid test facility. 

“The building is a disruptive innovation lab, and it is designed to produce fast feedback between the emerging science and the early application of the technology,” says Rob Miller, director of the Whittle Lab. 

Modeled in part on the rapid test and development approach used in Formula 1 racing and inspired by historically innovative U.S. institutions such as the Bell Laboratories and Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works, the facility aims to slash the time for new technologies to reach technology readiness level (TRL) 6—or a level sufficiently mature for full scale development.

“From somebody having an idea to the technology being demonstrated at TRL 6 is constantly six to eight years because the sector is highly siloed,” Miller says. “If you start putting that into timescales, and you start talking about the number of technologies which are going to have to be developed there’s just no way we’re going to develop them in time to meet aviation commitment to net zero carbon emissions by 2050.” 

So, Miller and his research associates started looking at ways to cut that time down. “We had an idea about how to demonstrate this quickly, and using lessons learned from Formula One we aimed to go about 10 times faster,” Miller tells Aviation Week. “But in formal trials we did in 2017 with the government-backed Aerospace Technology Institute [ATI] and Rolls-Royce we managed to go 100 times faster—we took processes that were taking two years down to a matter of days or weeks.”

“This was a bit of a stunner,” Miller says. “The ATI said, ‘Can you scale that?’ And so we’re building the National Center for Propulsion and Power as a big scale up of that. But also, because of the multiple disciplines involved in the process, you really need to collect a different group of people together than in the original Whittle Lab.” Miller was referring to the current facility which has been at the forefront of UK propulsion research since the early 1970s.

“You need chemical engineers, electrical engineers, manufacturing, and machine learning. So, the new Whittle Lab is double the scale of the first lab, and brings all those skills around one big atrium, all focused on the technology. The idea is the building is for all the disciplines to work on the ideas together. Then we have this ability to design, test and learn in about one-hundredth of the time—so it’s like a Bell Lab for aviation,” Miller says, referring to the U.S. research facility credited with the development of breakthroughs ranging from radio astronomy and the transistor to the laser and several foundational computer languages.

Miller says the new Whittle Lab is designed for the design, test and development changes that are needed to meet the sustainability challenge facing aviation. “When you take a steady state sector, then it really pays to silo,” Miller says. “But when you’re in a system of massive disruption, the rate at which the fundamental science is evolving—and the rate at which the application is evolving—occur together.”

“This is what Kelly Johnson [founder of the Skunk Works] did and this is what Bell Labs did,” he adds. “The winner is somebody who can feedback quickly, repeatedly. As the application changes you redirect the science back and forth. The building has been designed as a machine to reproduce that that process.” 

The National Center for Propulsion and Power will include a wind tunnel called the rapid test variable density facility which will be pressurized to achieve transonic and supersonic Mach numbers and represent Reynolds numbers in a timely fashion. “This allows the engineers or researchers to ‘short circuit’ the TRL ladder and test multiple models at engine representative conditions very quickly. This mirrors Formula 1 where a new design space can be explored at representative conditions very quickly,” Miller says.   

“One area we’re doing a lot of work on is in hydrogen fuel cells and distributed propulsion. Because on a whole system level there’s a real area for unlocking great potential. At the moment, a fuel cell power density of 1.5 kW per kilogram would only get you 500 to 1,000 nm with a fuel burn that’s about 50% energy per passenger km. above Jet A [aviation jet fuel],” Miller says. “But if you go out to 2035 and you look at some of the other technologies coming in, you see the system unlock, and it’s highly nonlinear. The range of the aircraft scales and you end up with ranges like 4,000 km [2,200 nm]. You have to be able to understand those unlocks and then put teams together rapidly of multiple disciplines on those problems to run them to ground quickly.”

During his visit, King Charles—who was making his first official engagement since the May 6 coronation ceremony—also attended a meeting of government and aviation representatives to discuss potential future pathways to a sustainable aviation industry. These pathways have been developed by the Aviation Impact Accelerator (AIA), an international expert group set up in 2020 by Miller which aims to build an interactive whole-system simulator to accelerate the journey to climate-neutral aviation.

The AIA multidisciplinary team includes members from the University of Cambridge’s Department of Chemical Engineering, Hopkinson Laboratory, BP Institute, Judge Business School, and Bennett Institute, together with the Air Transportation Systems Lab at University College London, and the Melbourne Energy Institute at the University of Melbourne. The project is in partnership with the former Prince of Wales’s Sustainable Markets Initiative, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, NASA, the World Economic Forum, Cambridge Zero, MathWorks, and Satavia, with the input of industry advisors including Rolls-Royce, Boeing, BP, Heathrow Airport and Siemens Energy.

AIA recently worked with Boeing on the development of the company’s Cascade data modeling tool to show the most effective scenarios for reaching net zero by 2050.