Fuel Pump Power and Thermal Conceptual Design Investigation for a High Speed Vehicle

Abstract

The design of a high-speed vehicle presents new challenges when compared to a lower speeds. At high speeds, there is no turbine or other rotating component within the propulsion system to generate electrical power, and or drive the fuel pump, necessitating an alternative means to turn the device to sustain thrust. As it is desirable to consider the power generation system earlier in the conceptual design process of high-speed vehicles, a means by which the power requirements of a generic geometry can be acquired quickly must be obtained, which for high speeds includes the power requirements of the fuel pump. In prior work, a conceptual design level 6DOF simulation was created to model the power and thermal requirements of high-speed vehicle subsystems. This work expands the previous work by implementing a fuel pump driven by an electric motor. The pump; modeled as a variable displacement pump, and motor are modeled and controlled in the developed SIMULINK model. A power and thermal analysis was performed for the entire subsystem and the profiles for each were extracted from the SIMULNK model. Upon simulation, both the power and thermal profiles for the fuel pump and motor subsystem were available for analysis at the conceptual design level