Preliminary Sizing of Electric-Propulsion Powertrains for Concept Aircraft Designs

Abstract

The drive towards a greener and more sustainable future is encouraging the aviation industry to move towards increasing electrification of its fleet. The development of electric propulsion technologies also requires new approaches to assess their viability in novel configurations. A methodology is proposed which consists of four sub-procedures; powertrain modelling, performance analysis, aerodynamic modelling, and sizing. This approach initially considers powertrain modelling using AIAA symbol representations, and a review of the available literature establishes state-of-the-art component values of efficiency, specific power, specific energy, and specific fuel consumption. The sizing procedure includes a mission and aerodynamic analysis to determine the energy and power requirements, and it relies on a mass regression model based on full-electric, hybrid, VTOL and fixed-wing aircraft found in the literature. The methodology has been applied to five case studies which are representative of a wide range of missions and configurations. Their predicted masses from the sizing procedure have been validated against their actual masses. The predicted total mass shows generally good agreement with the actual values, and in addition, accurate values for active mass have been predicted. A sensitivity analysis of the sizing procedure suggests that future work may include a more accurate analysis of aerodynamics and mission if the methodology were to be applied for selecting aircraft concepts.

Keywords

• aircraft
• electric-propulsion
• powertrain
• design
• modelling