Preliminary hybrid-electric aircraft design with advancements on the open-source tool SUAVE

Abstract

Abstract The large variety of possible propulsion architectures for environmentally friendly and sustainable aircraft concepts create opportunities for the overall aircraft design. In particular, hybrid-electric aircraft have an increased number of additional components that must be implemented in the aircraft design tool. Primary and secondary energy sources can be used to achieve the necessary reduction in emissions. The preliminary aircraft design tool SUAVE offers the basic setup necessary to integrate the electrification of the propulsion system into the aircraft design. For this purpose, SUAVE has been extended to enable an iterative sizing loop for hybrid-electric aircraft. Hence, many propulsion architectures are easily adaptable. Additional components can be included and their interactions are considered. Furthermore, the fidelity levels of the models are modifiable. Moreover, the top-level aircraft requirements are transformed into a sizing chart to calculate the necessary power and wing loading. Thereby, a reasonable hybridization factor of installed power can be identified. This definition of hybridization implies a specific energy management strategy. As a result, hybridization and the energy management strategy are directly coupled and have to be considered together. Finally, in the postprocessing, the raw data is processed and can be evaluated with figures of merit. This procedure converts the results into a descriptive value and facilitates the comparison to other configurations. The figures of merit include evaluations for emissions, operational aspects and development costs and effort.