An integrated approach to vehicle and subsystem sizing and analysis for novel subsystem architectures

Abstract

The aerospace industry is currently transitioning to More Electric subsystem architectures due to steadily improving electric technologies and the technology saturation of established conventional architectures. For aircraft with such unconventional architectures, the lack of historical information and the presence of increased inter-subsystem interactions create a significant design challenge. These necessitate a greater focus on subsystems design earlier in the design process than typically seen for aircraft with conventional subsystem architectures. At the same time, however, to be suitable for the early design phases, the subsystem analyses must be computationally inexpensive and not require detailed aircraft definition. This work presents an integrated, modular, and tool-independent approach to the sizing and performance analysis of the aircraft and its subsystems, in which inter-dependencies are established between relevant aircraft and subsystem level parameters. The approach allows the assessment of subsystem architectures using vehicle and mission level metrics for a fixed vehicle design, and also the amplified effect of re-sizing the vehicle in accordance with a pre-defined rule-set. The proposed approach was demonstrated through a comparative assessment of a predominantly electric subsystem architecture and a conventional one for a representative single-aisle aircraft. In this assessment, the impacts of changing the form of secondary power extraction, the change in vehicle empty weight, and re-sizing of the vehicle were successively identified.

Analysis and design of hybrid electric regional turboprop aircraft

“…The industry is currently in the process of adopting the 'more-electric' aircraft in which various aircraft systems (pneumatic and hydraulic) are replaced by electric systems [1][2][3][4][5]. Various recent studies highlight the potential of (partly) using electric power for propulsion.…”

Parallel hybrid electric propulsion architecture for single aisle aircraft - powertrain investigation

“…In such a MEA system architecture, all pneumatic and hydraulic components in the non-propulsive systems, like ECS, ice protection, landing gear, flight controls, are replaced by electric systems. This was investigated in some detail for single aisle aircraft in [15], and the main changes in system masses are given in table 3 below. The non-propulsive power demands for the MEA architecture during the mission are assumed to be constant per flight phase [15], [14], as listed in Table 2.…”

“…This was investigated in some detail for single aisle aircraft in [15], and the main changes in system masses are given in table 3 below. The non-propulsive power demands for the MEA architecture during the mission are assumed to be constant per flight phase [15], [14], as listed in Table 2. For this configuration, the sizing of the electric equipment yields a total mass increase of about 359 kg (1339 kg increase due to additional battery mass minus 980 kg saving due to application of the MEA systems architecture).).…”

Enabling Interactive Safety and Performance Trade-offs in Early Airframe Systems Design

“…This subsystem level performance is related to aircraft level optimization through the values of the weighting factors, which can be changed by the aircraft level optimizer in order to maximize the aircraft utility. A functional approach to subsystem architecting is employed by Chakraborty et al [9], leveraging the choice of alternative solutions for each aircraft subsystem. The approach for subsystem sizing consists of steady state equations models representing subsystems and empirical relations.…”