Operational availability analysis of short-haul electric aeroplane using polynomial chaos expansion

Abstract

As a promising solution to green and sustainable aviation, electric aircraft is likely to operate only in short-haul flight routes due to the technical bottleneck of batteries. This paper proposes an efficient methodology of operational availability analysis for electric aeroplane design. A comprehensive framework using trajectory optimisation is built to evaluate the electric aeroplane performance, which integrates the constraints from physical characteristics, airworthiness regulations, and safety requirement. To account for varying environmental conditions, the polynomial chaos expansion (PCE) method is introduced to enable efficient uncertainty analysis. The proposed methodology is applied to a small short-haul electric aeroplane case. The result shows that the performance of electric aeroplane can be predicted accurately by the PCE method with significant reduction of computational effort. The exemplary analysis in Nordic area provides useful information of operational availability subject to environmental uncertainties.

Keywords:

• Electric aircraft
• operational availability
• trajectory optimisation
• polynomial chaos expansion

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).