Electrified Aircraft Propulsion

Electrified propulsion is reshaping aircraft design, but realizing practical concepts requires rigorous systems-level analysis of feasibility, integration pathways, and mission performance. Working with NASA’s Electrified Aircraft Propulsion (EAP) program and its Electrified Powertrain Flight Demonstration (EPFD) Project, our lab develops methods to evaluate next-generation propulsion architectures and identify the technologies and design choices that most improve efficiency, weight, and operational capability.

A core element of this effort is our Future Aircraft Sizing Tool (FAST) which unifies physics-based and data-driven models in a single computational framework. FAST enables rapid sizing and performance prediction for both conventional and advanced concepts, delivering full-mission analyses in under a minute to support expansive design-space exploration and optimization. FAST’s Graph-based Propulsion System Analysis (GPSA) Framework represents arbitrary propulsion architectures, allowing apples-to-apples comparison of integration strategies.

To parameterize early-stage designs, we predict key performance parameters (KPPs) with non-parametric Gaussian Process Regressions (GPRs) trained on Aerobase–an open-source historical database of over 400 aircraft and 200 engines compiled from FAA and EASA type-certificate data. Embedding these surrogates within FAST enables fast, consistent evaluations that reflect historical trends while leaving room for technology deltas.

Together, FAST’s computational framework with embedded GPRs is leveraged to perform sensitvity analyses and trade studies to inform stakeholders of the most important technologies to invest in. Two configurations studied so far were notional models of NASA’s Hybrid Electric Turboprop COmmerical Freighter (HETCOF) and SUbsonic Single Aft eNgine (SUSAN) concepts. Trade studies on the HETCOF identified tradeoffs between the payload carried onboard and the size of the electrified propulsion system that can be fit into its existing airframe. Design studies on SUSAN explored the system-level benefits of incorporating boundary layer ingestion and natural laminar flow technologies into the concept.

This work is sponsored by the NASA Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate and Electrified Powertrain Flight Demonstration project, “Development of a Parametrically Driven Electrified Aircraft Design and Optimization Tool,” Glenn Engineering and Research Support (GEARS) Contract No. WO-0238.