On more electric airplane: case study Stockholm-Copenhagen

Abstract: In parallel to growing global population, the amount of people traveling around the worldalso increases. This pushes the industry to develop more energy efficient vehicles. Theconcept of electrification of vehicles has been adopted by the aviation industry in orderto reduce environmental impacts and lower operating costs. Although much research hasbeen done on various more electric airplanes, almost all of them are conducted only forone subsystem, lacking the aim of optimizing the total energy outtake from the enginesby all subsystems. This report aims to fill this gap by applying optimization techniquesto systematically decide when novel technologies are worthwhile, in terms of energy efficiency.Hence, the goal of this report is to develop a methodology for evaluating whendifferent MEA technologies are beneficial to implement in future airplanes. In this proposedapproach, a Matlab model has been developed which takes publicly available nonpropulsivepower demands and efficiencies of various subsystems into account, integratesthose with real flight data of a case study, and as a result gives the user a comparison of nonpropulsivefuel burn, being 1088.5 kg for conventional, 756.5 kg for more-electric, and 351.5kg for all-electric architectures, depending on the level of electrification. The difference intotal fuel burn between the conventional and all electric cases, including fuel consumptionfor propulsion, represents a reduction of total fuel burn on the order of 10 percent. Sinceas many electrical loads as possible are integrated into the proposed approach, this modelcan also be used for generator sizing as discussed in the results section of the case study.