Conceptual design study for a radical short medium range hybrid aircraft
Creators: name:  J. VANKAN 
name:   W. LAMMEN 
name:   S. DEFOORT 
Publisher: name: Proceedings of  the 9th European Conference for Aerospace Sciences. Lille, France, 27 June - 1 July, 2022
Year: 2022
Subjects: HYBRID ELECTRIC PROPULSION
AVIATION
EMISSIONS

description: The further reduction of greenhouse gas emissions is essential for aviation to accommodate the expected increase in air travel and at the same time to pursue its service to society and environment. This calls for ambitious research and disruptive technology solutions, well beyond the continuous improvement of current aircraft technologies. In the H2020 project IMOTHEP (Investigation and Maturation of Technologies for Hybrid Electric Propulsion) [1] the exploration of key technologies for hybrid electric propulsion (HEP) is under investigation. This has to be addressed in close relation with developments of aircraft mission and configuration, to derive relevant specifications for the investigation of electric components, such as the power needs and the operational constraints. As part of the IMOTHEP project activities on integrated vehicle design, conceptual level design investigations are executed on various aircraft configurations. These configurations are targeted for missions that contribute significantly to unwanted aviation emissions, i.e. regional (REG) missions and short-medium range (SMR) missions. For both mission types, different types of aircraft and propulsion configurations are considered: conservative (CON) and radical (RAD). The conservative configurations include moderate technology developments without substantial design changes in the airframe. The radical configurations include more advanced technology developments in combination with unconventional airframe design. For the radical (RAD) configuration for the short-medium range (SMR) mission, in particular, a blended-wing-body (BWB) configuration with distributed electric propulsion (DEP) is investigated. The conceptual design investigations are based on representative top level aircraft requirements (TLARs) that have been defined in the IMOTHEP project by the industrial airframers who are partners in IMOTHEP. The reference aircraft for the SMR mission is based on the A320neo aircraft, slightly adapted to comply with the IMOTHEP TLARs for SMR. The design objectives for the conceptual investigations are based on the IMOTHEP project targets. These project targets are expressed as criteria for emission reductions. These criteria are set for all design studies and are derived from the targets that were set for 2035 in clean sky 2 (CS2) [2]: CO2: -30%; NOx: -30%; noise: -30%. The NLR investigations for the SMR-RAD configuration are done using the NLR tools for conceptual a/c design and for mission evaluation MASS (Mission, Aircraft and Systems Simulation for HEP analysis)[3]. MASS includes models coming from various other tools, such as for flight mission modelling, aircraft modelling, electric components modelling and engine modelling (GSP: Gas-turbine Simulation Program ) and predicts fuel and energy consumption and emissions. The full paper will present configuration studies of HEP architectures. From these investigations, the main results for fuel consumption, emissions and propulsive equipment sizing for the BWB airframe in combination with a power train based on the all turboelectric (TE) architecture will be given.