As the global population and economy grow, the amount of people traveling around the world also increases.This creates a need for the aerospace industry to develop more energy efficient vehicles. The concept ofelectrification of vehicles has been adopted by the aviation industry in order to reduce environmental impactsand lower operating costs. Although much research has been done on various more electric aircrafttechnologies, almost all of them are conducted only for one subsystem, lacking the aim of optimizing the totalenergy outtake from the engines by all subsystems. This paper aims to fill this gap by applying optimizationtechniques to decide systematically when novel technologies are worthwhile, in terms of energy efficiency.Hence, the goal of this paper is to develop a methodology for evaluating when different MEA technologies arebeneficial to implement in future airplanes. In this proposed approach, a Matlab model has been developedwhich takes publicly available non-propulsive power demands and efficiencies of various subsystems intoaccount, integrates those with real flight data from a case study, and as a result gives the user a comparisonof non-propulsive fuel burn. The result is a fuel burn of 1088.5 kg for conventional, 756.5 kg for more-electric,and 351.5 kg for all-electric architectures, depending on the level of electrification. The difference in total fuelburn between the conventional and all electric cases, including fuel consumption for propulsion, represents areduction of total fuel burn on the order of 10 percent. Since as many electrical loads as possible are integratedinto the proposed approach, this model can also be used for generator sizing as discussed in the results sectionof the case study.
Part of ISBN 9781713871163
QC 20230607