Market Opportunities and Aircraft Requirements
The economic feasibility study (Deliverable D2.1) conducted within ELICA project showed that the emerging Regional Air Mobility (RAM), i.e. the concept of utilising the point-to-point connection of airfields to reduce travel times significantly. Based on the analysis of the two above mentioned emerging market segments, Top Level Aircraft Requirements (TLARs) were derived for ELICA. For more explanation it is referred to the Deliverable D2.2.
Power Train Architectures
Aircraft pre-design is an iterative process, which requires fast responding models for component mass, performance, and size to keep computational effort on a manageable level. Response surfaces for mass, performance and geometry parameters were calculated for each components of the electric power train system. These response surfaces will be used for further aircraft design studies (Deliverable D3.3). Thermal management system (TMS) design is an integral part of the aircraft design, influencing the performance, weight and balance of the vehicle. Two realistic TMS concepts have been designed for the 2025 and 2035 aircraft configuration with weight and efficiency estimations fed back into the aircraft design (Deliverable D3.4).
Aircraft Conceptual Design and Analysis
The above-mentioned components of the aircraft design chain were developed and refined during the ELICA project progress. The inputs generated in Work Packages 3 were valuable and essential for on-going investigations. UNINA and SMARTUP integrated the development work of SISW and RRD into the UNINA’s aircraft design chain and validated the implementation. This work laid a solid base for the increased fidelity analyses and MDO applications that will allow the determination of the final aircraft configurations for a 19 passenger commuter aircraft hybrid-electric and full-electric targeting near-zero emissions utilizing the available technologies enabling EIS for 2025 and 2035 (Deliverable D4.2). Based on the expected available near-term and long-term technologies analysed in Task 5.1 a hybrid-electric aircraft concept was selected for EIS 2025, and a hydrogen fuel cell powered electric design was proposed for EIS 2035. An innovative TIP-DEP configuration, i.e. Distributed Electric Propulsion with TIP propulsors, has been pre-selected as a promising configuration.
Scientific, Technical Challenge and Trade-Off Analysis
The main objective was to collect all output coming perform trade-off analysis on system and performance parameters, based on market forecast, mobility scenarios and TLAR coming from WP2. SMARTUP has performed the analysis on system technologies suggested by RRD, and performance parameters suggested by UNINA, in order to obtain a complete overview and provide guidelines for future technologies development and analysis.
Finally, the main regulatory, technical and operational challenges which should be faced for a successful innovative 19 passengers commuter aircraft with near-zero emissions have been explored. The technical challenges arise from the fact that the implementation of hybrid-electric architectures introduces much higher levels of complexity than conventional propulsion. For the hydrogen power aircraft, not only the storage of hydrogen, but also the transport on board via tanks and lines to the fuel cell are critical points where increased safety measures must be taken. To sum it up, it’s not enough to provide feasible zero-emission aircraft concepts, the realization of zero-emission aviation requires a joint effort across the politics, industry and customers. For more details, it is referred to the Deliverable D5.3.
