The trend towards More Electric Aircraft with higher integration of different sub-systems into a common energy network requires innovative approaches for the energy management. First, a well-designed energy management saves energy by optimizing power split. Second, it allows by its improved handling of loads to reduce the conservatism of the architectural design and hence weight and emissions. Therefore, energy management functions are a key enabling technology that needs to be available in early architectural design. They need to be of limited complexity in order to be quickly developed and potentially certifiable for on-board implementation.
Energy Management is hence a vital component for the future electrification of aircraft. Although this project focusses on the electrification of on-board systems some of its findings may be transferred to electric propulsion concepts as well. The electrification is important to society because it is one of the key-enablers towards a more sustainable aviation. The reduction of power consumption goes along with the reduction of CO2 and other polluting exhaust gases. The reduction of power consumption and the electric integration may also provide cost benefits that help to maintain flying affordable. In addition, electric environmental control systems may remove the health concerns that surround the current use of bleed-air.
The main objectives of ENERGIZE is to enable the design of energy management already in the early design stages of an aircraft. This can be broken down into the following sub-objectives:
- Create a model-base sufficiently detailed to show all relevant impacts of energy management actions for both the thermal and electric side.
- Make both the energy algorithm and the model-base versatile and flexible in their use so that many variants can be tried out.
- Demonstrate the certifiability and real-time capability of the energy management algorithm
- Assess the impact of the energy management on both operation and sizing.
In terms of maturity, DLR and NLR reached TRL4 by their own effort and supported industry to reach TRL5.
