Abstract
The aviation world is dealing with the development of new and greener aviation. The need for reducing greenhouse gas emission as well as the noise is a critical requirement for the aviation of the future. The aviation world is struggling with it, and a compelling alternative can be the electric propulsion. This work aims to present THEA-CODE, a tool for the conceptual design of hybrid-electric aircraft. The tool evaluates the potential benefits of the electric propulsion in terms of fuel burnt and direct and indirect CO2emissions. THEA-CODE is suitable not only for conventional “wing-tube” configurations but also for unconventional ones, such as the box-wing. The results show a significant reduction of fuel burnt adopting batteries with energy density higher than the current state of the art. A procedure to find the potential best compromise configurations is presented as well.
Highlights
The climate is changing, and it is mainly related to man activity [1]
The electrification of a regional Prandtl Plane has been considered; for this case of study, regional Prandtl Plane Top-Level Aircraft Requirements (TLARs) are similar to the ATR42 TLARs reported in [40]
The Maximum Take-Off Mass (MTOM) of the configurations as well as the fuel burnt, and the CO2 emissions are lower for the parallel hybrid architecture
Summary
In the last UN Climate Change Conference, held in Madrid, the European Union showed its will to reduce noxious emission within 2050 [2]. To decrease the CO2 and the NOx emissions and to reduce the greenhouse gas effects, a strong technological improvement is compulsory in all sectors, aviation included [3]. The aircraft CO2 emissions are about 2.7% [4,5] of the total world emissions; the aviation demand is growing 4.5% per year [6,7], and its contribution to greenhouse gas emissions will increase if real counteractions will not be undertaken. To satisfy the all new requirements, a technological breakthrough in all aviation sectors is necessary, from aircraft configurations (to enhance the aerodynamic efficiency) to propulsion architectures
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