Energy-Efficient Three-Wheel Bleedless Electrical Environmental Control System for a Passenger Aircraft

Abstract

The Environmental Control System (ECS) of an aircraft is designed to create a comfortable and suitable atmosphere for both passengers and crew, as well as the avionics. Additionally, the ECS represents the highest power consumers within non-propulsive systems in an aircraft. With sustainable technology development for aircraft, secondary systems such as the ECS are evolving from conventional bleed air to electric-type to improve energy efficiency by reducing fuel consumption. This study introduces a novel electrically-driven ECS (EECS) that is designed to replace the existing bleed-air-driven three-wheel air cycle system (ACS) and the high-pressure water separation subsystem (HPWS) of the Airbus 320 (A320) passenger aircraft's ECS during cruise conditions. MATLAB was used to construct the system component model of the ECS to verify the accuracy of the data from A320. The performance of the proposed EECS was compared with that of existing bleed-air system in terms of cabin requirements. The conventional ECS's bleed air off-take from the engine caused a 50% higher fuel mass penalty for missions lasting 5 to 15 hours, which exceeds the shaft power off-take of the EECS. The energy required for the conventional ECS and EECSs was 3.59 megajoule (MJ) and 1.78 MJ, respectively.