A Methodology to Evaluate Electric Environmental Control System Impact on Aircraft Drag and Mission Performance

Due to strengthening of environmental constraints and current industrial competitiveness, the airplane manufacturing industry is urged to turn towards an increase use of sustainable energy sources. A prominent concept is airplane electrification, either of the engine or various non-propulsive systems. In this paper, electrification of the Environmental Control System (ECS), which is used for cabin pressurization and electronic devices cooling, is analyzed. The objective is to develop a calculation method which allows to study the impact of ECS electrification on the aircraft mission performance, by taking into account the ambient air extraction impact on the aircraft drag. The method can be used at early design, for a complete aircraft mission, and is based on penalty analysis methods to convert the system performance impacts into fuel weight delta. In this paper a conventional and a fully electrified architecture are compared for a short-medium range aircraft. While the electrical ECS architecture is shown to be more advantageous with respect to the engine performance alone, preliminary studies using the presented method indicate that a conventional ECS architecture is more adapted regarding the overall aircraft mission fuel performance