Future pathways for eVTOLs: A design optimization perspective

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Janning, Johannes, Armanini, Sophie F., Fasel, Urban
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Janning, Johannes
Armanini, Sophie F.
Fasel, Urban
author_facet Janning, Johannes
Armanini, Sophie F.
Fasel, Urban
contents The rapid development of advanced urban air mobility, particularly electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft, requires interdisciplinary approaches involving the future urban air mobility ecosystem. Operational cost efficiency, regulatory aspects, sustainability, and environmental compatibility should be incorporated directly into the conceptual design of aircraft and across operational and regulatory strategies. In this work, we apply a novel multidisciplinary design optimization framework for the conceptual design of eVTOL aircraft. The framework optimizes conventional design elements of eVTOL aircraft over a generic mission and integrates a comprehensive operational cost model to directly capture economic incentives of the designed system through profit modeling for operators. We introduce a novel metric, the cross-transportation Figure of Merit (FoM), to compare the optimized eVTOL system with various competing road, rail, and air transportation modes in terms of sustainability, cost, and travel time. We investigate four objective-specific eVTOL optimization designs in a broad scenario space, mapping regulatory, technical, and operational constraints to generate a representation of potential urban air mobility stakeholder-centric design objectives. The analysis of an optimized profit-maximizing eVTOL, cost-minimizing eVTOL, sustainability-maximizing eVTOL, and a combined FoM-maximizing eVTOL design highlights significant trade-offs in the area of profitability, operational flexibility, and sustainability strategies. This underlines the importance of incorporating multiple operationally tangential disciplines into the design process, while also reflecting the diverse priorities of stakeholders such as operators, regulators, and society.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_18078
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Future pathways for eVTOLs: A design optimization perspective
Janning, Johannes
Armanini, Sophie F.
Fasel, Urban
Systems and Control
The rapid development of advanced urban air mobility, particularly electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft, requires interdisciplinary approaches involving the future urban air mobility ecosystem. Operational cost efficiency, regulatory aspects, sustainability, and environmental compatibility should be incorporated directly into the conceptual design of aircraft and across operational and regulatory strategies. In this work, we apply a novel multidisciplinary design optimization framework for the conceptual design of eVTOL aircraft. The framework optimizes conventional design elements of eVTOL aircraft over a generic mission and integrates a comprehensive operational cost model to directly capture economic incentives of the designed system through profit modeling for operators. We introduce a novel metric, the cross-transportation Figure of Merit (FoM), to compare the optimized eVTOL system with various competing road, rail, and air transportation modes in terms of sustainability, cost, and travel time. We investigate four objective-specific eVTOL optimization designs in a broad scenario space, mapping regulatory, technical, and operational constraints to generate a representation of potential urban air mobility stakeholder-centric design objectives. The analysis of an optimized profit-maximizing eVTOL, cost-minimizing eVTOL, sustainability-maximizing eVTOL, and a combined FoM-maximizing eVTOL design highlights significant trade-offs in the area of profitability, operational flexibility, and sustainability strategies. This underlines the importance of incorporating multiple operationally tangential disciplines into the design process, while also reflecting the diverse priorities of stakeholders such as operators, regulators, and society.
title Future pathways for eVTOLs: A design optimization perspective
topic Systems and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.18078