Date of Award

6-2021

Degree Name

MS in Aerospace Engineering

Department/Program

Aerospace Engineering

College

College of Engineering

Advisor

Paulo Iscold

Advisor Department

Aerospace Engineering

Advisor College

College of Engineering

Abstract

As the demand for air transportation is projected to increase, the environmental impacts produced by air travel will also increase. In order to counter the environmental impacts while also meeting the demand for air travel, there are goals and research initiatives that aim to develop more efficient aircraft. An emerging technology that supports these goals is the application of hybrid propulsion to aircraft, but there is a challenge in effectively exploring the performance of hybrid aircraft due to the time and money required for safe flight testing and due to the diverse design space of hybrid architectures and components. Therefore, computational tools that are capable of simulating the performance of a hybrid aircraft are incredibly useful in the design process and research space.

Existing work on the simulation of hybrid aircraft focuses on modelling a specific hybrid propulsion system in a particular airframe, but it would be desirable to have a simulation tool that is not specific to one design. In this thesis, a simulation framework that can be easily configured for different types of hybrid structures and components is presented, and the simulator is validated using flight test data which demonstrates that the performance of the simulated aircraft is representative of a real aircraft. A design for a hybrid aircraft is also modelled and simulated over different flight profiles in order to study the performance of the hybrid propulsion system. Results indicate that the hybrid aircraft can be successfully simulated and demonstrate how the simulator can be used as a tool to study the best way to fly and operate a hybrid aircraft.

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