Identification of application fields for electrical propulsion techniques and personal aerial vehicles

Abstract

Electric flight is supposed to be the next step towards a more sustainable air transport, especially with respect to unmanned aircraft systems (UAS). However, to determine the revolutionary character of electric flight we have to compare it to aircrafts driven by fossil fuels with respect to their technical abilities. Technical properties determining potential application fields are assumed to be maximum range and maximum speed (travel time). To identify application fields and the competition within we, first, collected the technical properties of 197 vehicles of type personal aerial vehicle (PAV), helicopter, small aircraft transportation system (SAT) and business jets, and second, apply agglomerative hierarchical clustering and density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN) using range and maximum speed. Electrical propulsion techniques are found to fall into the low range clusters and electrical and hybrid technologies dominate the very short ranges reaching up to 200 km. Though, helicopters are active in these ranges and superior regarding number of passengers plus maximum speed, they cannot compete with PAVs regarding costs, and even more important, environmental sustainability. In addition, the states of development of PAVs competing to helicopters with regard to range are still in scaled prototype or in concept phase. Thus, our findings underline the run for urban air mobility (UAM) as an application of electric propulsion techniques due to short ranges at slow speeds and the possibility of decreasing the environmental impact of mobility. Moreover, we cannot identify any competition of the new PAV technologies with classical aerial vehicles.