Feasibility of Electrified Propulsion for Ultra-Efficient Commercial Aircraft Final Report

MIT, Aurora Flight Sciences, and USC have collaborated to assess the feasibility of electric, hybridelectric, and turbo-electric propulsion for ultra-efficient commercial transportation. The work has drawn on the team expertise in disciplines related to aircraft design, propulsion-airframe integration, electric machines and systems, engineering system design, and optimization. A parametric trade space analysis has been carried out to assess vehicle performance across a range of transport missions and propulsion architectures to establish how electrified propulsion systems scale. An optimization approach to vehicle conceptual design modeling was taken to enable rapid multidisciplinary design space exploration and sensitivity analysis. The results of the analysis indicate vehicle aero-propulsive integration benefits enabled by electrification are required to offset the increased weight and loss associated with the electric system and achieve enhanced performance; the report describes the conceptual configurations than can offer such enhancements. The main contribution of the present work is the definition of electric vehicle design attributes for potential efficiency improvements at different scales. Based on these results, key areas for future research are identified, and extensions to the trade space analysis suitable for higher fidelity electrified commercial aircraft design and analysis have been developed

Understanding Of Nuclear Quadrupole Interactions Of \u3csup\u3e35\u3c/sup\u3eCl, \u3csup\u3e79\u3c/sup\u3eBr And \u3csup\u3e129\u3c/sup\u3eI And Binding Energies Of Solid Halogens At First-Principles Level

This paper deals with the understanding at a first-principles level of the nuclear quadrupole interaction (NQI) parameters of solid chlorine, bromine and iodine as well as the intermolecular binding of these molecules in the solid. The electronic structure investigations that we have carried out to study these properties of the solid halogens are based on the Hartree-Fock Cluster approach using the Roothaan variational procedure with electron correlation effects included using many-body perturbation theory with the empty orbitals used in the perturbation theory investigations for the excited states. The results of our investigations provide good agreement with the measured NQI parameters primarily from the Hartree-Fock one electron wave-functions with many-body effects making minor contributions. The binding (dissociation) energies for the molecules with the solid state environment on the other hand arises from intermolecular many body effects identified as the Van der Waals attraction with one-electron Hartree-Fock contribution being repulsive in nature. © 2008 Springer Science+Business Media B.V