This paper presents an overview on recent activities regarding development of models for electric propulsion systems within the Multidisciplinary Integrated Conceptual Aircraft Design and Optimization Environment (MICADO) developed at the Institute of Aerospace Systems (ILR) of RWTH Aachen University. While in early versions of MICADO only conventionally powered aircraft were considered, electric propulsion concepts have been addressed since 2016. The development started with a PhD thesis with regard to on-demand air mobility, in which different propulsion system architectures were investigated, including electrically driven high-lift propellers. The models have later been refined and extended to gain flexibility and to increase the fidelity level of the calculations. For large commercial aircraft the development started considering a decoupled parallel hybrid propulsion system for a reference aircraft based on the Airbus A320. In the scope of this paper, the different evolution steps of propulsion system definition, modeling, and utilization within MICADO are presented. While in the initial phase of the development the methods were rather tailored towards the specific system architectures at hand, the software was gradually generalized to gain flexibility. The traditional way of modeling the propulsion system as a single component, which is designed externally and only scaled within the aircraft design iteration, was abolished; the propulsion system was split into its individual components using component performance maps within the mission simulation. Finally, a new propulsion system library has been introduced, which is independent of the other software modules, and allows for arbitrary propulsion system architectures and flexible substitution of component models.
MICADO: Recent Developments of Models for Design and Evaluation of Electric Aircraft Propulsion Systems
2021
10 pages
Sonstige
Elektronische Ressource
Englisch
Recent developments in electric propulsion
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