The aerospace industry has always been looking forward new developments
with the aim to create more environmental friendly aircraft, as well as to improve
their performance.
Over the last few years, a prominent research topic to achieve these
challenging goals has been focussed on the incorporation of more electric
Secondary Power Systems (SPS), this concept is known as More Electric
Aircraft (MEA) or All Electric Aircraft (AEA) when the internal combustion engine
is also replaced. Among others, Airbus is using Electro-hydrostatic Actuators,
(EHAs) to combine hydraulic and electric power in A320 and A340 for flight
tests since 1993. The company TTTECH applied the same concept by working
on the development of an electrical steering system for an aircraft nose landing
gear, and power source rationalization and electrical power flexibility in aircraft.
Some of the advantages stated when the MEA concept is applied are: reduction
in aircraft weight and performance penalties related to conventional SPS.
Although the More/All electric aircraft concept provided satisfactory results for
fixed-wing aircraft, research for rotary-wing aircraft is less common. This
encourages the assessment of fuel consumption and performance penalties
due to conventional and more electric SPS at conceptual level, which could
achieve similar outcomes, while finding the best configuration possible.
This project takes into account the previous research focused on fixed-wing
aircraft and studies on new technologies for SPS within Cranfield University,
this includes electrical Ice Protection System (IPS), Environmental Control
System (ECS) and Actuation System (AS). Additionally, Fuel System (FS) and
Electrical System (ES) capabilities were added, developing a generic tool able
to predict the total power requirements depending on the flight conditions. This
generic tool was then integrated with a performance model, where overall fuel
consumption is calculated for a flight mission, giving continuity and
improvement to the work already done.
Secondary systems configuration and operating characteristics for a
representative light single-engine rotary-wing aircraft were tailored, and the
systems behaviour is presented. Finally, fuel consumption was calculated for a
baseline mission profile, and compared to the fuel consumption when the
systems are not included. The baseline mission set the initial flight conditions
from which a parametric study was carried out; by varying these conditions the
parametric study determined total fuel requirements for the analysed flight
segments. An increment of up to %1.9 in the fuel consumption was found by
integrating the proposed systems to the performance model, showing the
impact produced by the systems, and the importance of studying different
technologies to minimise it.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:CRANFIELD1/oai:dspace.lib.cranfield.ac.uk:1826/8472 |
| Date | 09 1900 |
| Creators | Porras Perucho, Henry Andres |
| Contributors | Lawson, C. P. |
| Publisher | Cranfield University |
| Source Sets | CRANFIELD1 |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis or dissertation, Masters, MSc by Research |
| Rights | © Cranfield University 2013. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the written permission of the copyright owner. |
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