Power Management Optimization for Off-Design Performance Assessment of Ducted Electric Fan with Boundary Layer Ingestion

Abstract

This work consists on the examination of the system level benefits of a partially turboelectric propulsion architecture with Boundary Layer Ingestion (BLI) in a 150-pax class size commercial aircraft. This propulsion system consists of an electric ducted fan that ingests the boundary layer from the aft-end of the fuselage. The power for this aft-fan is extracted from two underwing turbofan engines. The BLI effects are quantified in CFD using the power balance method, which are then integrated using surrogate models into an aircraft sizing and mission analysis environment to obtain mission performance metrics. With the overarching goal of minimizing fuel consumption, an approach to optimize the motor power during off-design analysis is presented. The effect that different power management strategies have on system performance are also analyzed. The results showed that such novel propulsion architecture not only presents benefits with respect to a conventional system, but also that the application of an optimized power schedule offers additional fuel burn reductions.

The Environmental Design Space: Modeling and Performance Updates

“…Therefore, it was decided to port over some of this capability over to EDS. This work was documented by Brucculeri [50], who also implemented a 1D optimizer for power management control between the turbofans and the BLI electric fan. The result is a common modeling environment that allows performing direct performance comparisons between an unconventional advanced propulsion architecture such as the STARC-ABL with respect to the baseline vehicles currently available in EDS.…”