As the goals of air transport shift towards more-electric or all-electric airplanes, different drive train configurations have been explored recently. A major goal on the way towards the inclusion in commercial air traffic is high reliability. One of the experimental electric airplanes is NASA’s X-57 “Maxwell”, which consists of fourteen electric motors powered by a battery pack. The aim of this paper is to assess the reliability of the proposed design of the X-57 by using the Lz-transform approach, as well as to propose several alternative designs to its electric drive train in order to use less vehicle mass on the motors and more on the battery pack, without sacrificing the original availability and expected performance, with a final goal to increase the flight range. The reliability analyses show that replacing the X-57’s three-phase motors with six-phase ones greatly improves the availability of the electric drive train due to the use of fault-tolerant electric machines. Additionally, all the further proposed alternative designs have higher availability than the X-57. The alternatives with cascaded H-bridge (CHB) inverter topologies generally achieved higher availability values and higher expected performance than the six-pulse bridge (B6) variants. Finally, a distributed propulsion system with smaller take-off motors leads to a motor-mass advantage compared to more conventional drive train designs.
Comparison and Choice of Fault-Tolerant Traction Drive Topologies for a Full Electric Airplane
SpringerBriefs in Applied Sciences
2025-08-09
24 pages
Article/Chapter (Book)
Electronic Resource
English
Aircraft reliability , Comparative analysis , Fault tolerance , <italic>L</italic><sub><italic>z</italic></sub>-transform , Electric airplane Astronomy, Astrophysics and Cosmology , Power Electronics, Electrical Machines and Networks , Physics and Astronomy , Engineering , Aerospace Technology and Astronautics
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