Energy Management Strategies in a Fuel Cell–Powered Aircraft

Abstract

The addition of several power sources in an aircraft increases the complexity of the sizing and energy management problem while allowing a system redundancy that makes aircrafts safer. The optimization of the sizing and the energy management of hybrid electric aircraft powertrains can be accomplished using comprehensive mathematical models from the aircraft and its power sources, reducing the load of experimental activities that turn to be expensive and time-consuming. In this work, the authors apply an optimization method to obtain two optimized energy management strategies to be applied to two different types of all-electric aircraft: a general aviation powertrain and an electric vertical take-off and landing powertrain. These two aircrafts are designed to employ the same power sources configuration with a hydrogen-fueled fuel cell and a battery pack. The energy management optimization was performed to maximize the traveled distance while keeping the battery’s state of charge difference at a minimum, observing the power sources restrictions. In addition, for the second powertrain, the optimization of the power sources was performed. The analysis of the results shows that using the proposed method, the general aviation powertrain improves the traveled distance by 2.78%, reducing the equivalent energy consumption by 2.73%, and the electric vertical take-off and landing powertrain reduces the equivalent power consumption and guarantees the same battery’s state of charge at the start and at the end of the flight allowing a non-plugin operation.