With civil aviation growing at around 4.7% per annum, the environmental footprint of aviation is increasing. Moreover, the use of kerosene as a fuel accelerates the depletion of non-renewable fossil fuels and increases global warming. Hence, the aviation industry has to come up with new technologies to reduce its environmental impact and make aviation more sustainable. An electrically assisted propulsion system can combine the benefits of an electrical power source with a conventional turbofan engine. However, the additional electrical system increases the weight of the aircraft and complexity of the power management system. The objective of this research is to analyze the effect of an assistive electrical system on the performance of a turbofan engine for an A320 class aircraft on a short-range mission. The developed simulation model consists of an aircraft performance model combined with a propulsion model. The power management strategy is integrated within the simulation model. With the proposed propulsion system and power management strategy, the electrically assisted propulsion system would be able to reduce fuel burn, total energy consumption, and emissions for short-range missions of around 1000 km.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to provide a design solution of an engine intake duct suitable for delivering air to the compressor of a gas turbine engine of a general aviation turboprop aircraft, where the initial duct shape suffers a problem of flow distortion due to flow separation at the compressor inlet.
Design/methodology/approach
Aerodynamic design uses a three-dimensional inverse-by-optimization approach where the deviation from a desirable target pressure distribution is minimized by means of the adjoint method.
Findings
By virtue of a minimization algorithm, the specified target pressure distribution does not necessarily have to be fully realizable to drive the initial pressure distribution towards one with a favourable pressure gradient. The resulting optimized engine intake duct features a deceleration region, in a diverging channel, followed by an acceleration region, in a contracting channel, inhibiting flow separation on the compressor inlet plane.
Practical implications
The flow separation at the compressor inlet has been eliminated allowing proper installation of the engine and flight testing of the aircraft.
Originality/value
Placement and shaping of the intake duct of a turboshaft and turboprop gas turbine engine is a common industrial problem which can be challenging when the available space is limited. The inverse-by-optimization approach based on a reduced flow model, i.e. inviscid flow based on the Euler equations, and a specification of a simple target pressure distribution constitutes an efficient method to overcome the challenge.
Purpose
The present paper aims to describe the model updating of a small aircraft dynamic finite element model (FEM) to improve its agreement with ground vibration test (GVT) data.
Design/methodology/approach
An automatic updating method using an optimization procedure is carried out. Instead of using dedicated updating tools, the procedure is implemented using standard MSC/NASTRAN because of wide availability of the software in small aircraft industries. The objective function is defined to minimize the differences in the natural frequency and the differences in the mode shape between the analytical model and the GVT data. Provision has been made to include the quantification of confidence in both the GVT data and in the initial model. Parameter grouping is carried out to reduce the number of design parameters during the optimization process.
Findings
The optimization module of standard finite element (FE) software can be effectively used to reduce the differences between the GVT and the FEM in terms of frequency and mode shape satisfactorily. The strategy to define the objective function based on minimizing the mode shape error can reduce the improvement in the frequency error. The required user interference can be kept low.
Originality/value
The most important contribution of the present paper concerns the combination of strategies to define the objective function and selection of the parameters.
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