Thermal management challenges for HEA–FUTPRINT 50

Electric and Hybrid-Electric Aircraft (HEA) incorporate new systems, which demand an integration level higher than classical propulsion architectures systems do. High power electrical motors, converters, batteries or fuel cells, and distributed propulsion, all introduce new kinds of heat sources and dynamics that have to be accounted for and regulated. The latent opportunity to explore synergies among these systems requires the development of new models and their coupling with multi-disciplinary design optimization (MDO) toolchains. Also, an understanding of the implications into aircraft operations and trade-offs are critical to evaluate and validate gains at the aircraft level. This paper provides a definition of thermal management and functions of thermal management system (TMS) in aircraft, HEA thermal management challenges, main opportunities, conclusions and the way forward. A discussion of road ahead, regarding development of capabilities to support the design of TMS will be brought to the fore along the project, showcasing the open approach of FUTPRINT50 to be driven by open collaboration in order to accelerate the entry into service of this type of aircraft

A unified partial pressure field and velocity decomposition approach toward improved energetic aerodynamic force decompositions

Drag decomposition through energy and exergy-based methods has been shown to have a variety of advantages. One of these is identifying and quantifying the recoverable energy within a flow field. This describes the available energy that can be used to produce thrust through systems such as boundary layer ingestion. Another advantage highlighted from prior work is that the velocity decomposition approach can split the flow field into its isentropic and non-isentropic contributions. This provides region-specific formulations for drag assessment, wherein the isentropic field is associated with contributions originating from the bulk flow and the non-isentropic field with the shear layer. This paper aims to assess the performance of a modified form of the velocity decomposition approach for transonic flows. This modification involves unification with partial pressure field analysis, which provides better flow field separability due to the added decomposition of the pressure field

Conceptual Design Studies of “Boosted Turbofan” Configuration for short range

This paper describes the current activities at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and an associated consortium related to conceptual design studies of an aircraft configuration with hybrid electric propulsion for a typical short range commercial transport mission. The work is implemented in the scope of the European Clean Sky 2 program in the project “Advanced Engine and Aircraft Configurations” (ADEC) and “Turbo electric Aircraft Design Environment” (TRADE). The configuration analyzed incorporates parallel hybrid architecture consisting of gas turbines, electric machines, and batteries that adds electric power to the fans of the engines. A conceptual aircraft sizing workflow built in the DLR’s “Remote Component Environment” (RCE) incorporating tools of DLR that are based on semi-empirical and low level physics based methods. The TRADE consortium developed a simulation and optimization design platform with analysis models of higher fidelity for an aircraft with hybrid electric propulsion architecture. An implementation of the TRADE simulation and optimization design platform into the DLR’s RCE workflow by replacing the DLR models was carried out. The focus of this paper is on the quantitative evaluation of the “Boosted Turbofan” configuration utilizing the resulting workflow. In order to understand the cooperation between the DLR and TRADE consortium, a brief overview of the activities is given. Then the multi-disciplinary overall aircraft sizing workflow for hybrid electric aircraft built in RCE is shown. Hereafter, the simulation and optimization models of the TRADE design platform are described. Subsequently, an overview of the aircraft configuration considered in the scope of this work is given. The design space studies of the “Boosted Turbofan” configuration are presented. Finally, the deviations of the results between the workflows with and without the TRADE modules are discussed