Propulsion System Optimization for a Turboelectric Tiltwing Urban Air Mobility Aircraft

An emerging potential market within the aviation industry is short, frequent air taxi flights within the urban airspace. These air taxis (also called urban air mobility or UAM vehicles) are envisioned to be vertical take-o and landing designs which are capable of carrying 1 to 15 passengers in an intra-urban environment with less than 50 nautical miles of range. Numerous vehicle conceptual designs have been proposed by various industry and government organizations to fulfill these potential missions. These concepts are enabled by recent advancements in a number of areas including propulsion and power systems. While new technologies are making these vehicles possible, this new UAM design space is large, unexplored, and multidisciplinary in nature. New challenges exist in identifying and creating optimized designs for these unique vehicles with new propulsion technologies. This work presents the development of a suite of propulsion system analysis tools, which when coupled together, can improve the multidisciplinary conceptual design and optimization of UAM vehicle propulsion systems. These analysis tools are then applied to the design optimization of a turboelectric propulsion system for a notional UAM tiltwing concept. The optimization demonstration for this vehicle shows how a tightly-coupled multidisciplinary design can be developed which considers both physical design characteristics and operating schedules. Furthermore, the results explore trade-o s in the thermal management system design and how those trade-o s impact the overall vehicle.