Framework for Technical Performance Uncertainty in Hybrid-Electric Aircraft Development

For projects working on new and cutting-edge technologies, it is essential to understand the state of the project as testing and modeling progresses and recognize how technical changes may impact the end product. This is especially true for hybrid-electric aircraft, where the implementation and operations of the electric propulsion systems have many impactful variations on the overall system performance. This paper proposes a framework for uncertainty evaluation of a hybrid-electric vehicle where the design of the hybrid-electric propulsion is fixed. This framework is developed to evaluate the model prediction of hybrid-electric aircraft and is applied to a hybridized De Havilland Canada Dash 8-400 (Dash 8) aircraft with the PW150A engine. This proposed framework is currently being used at NASA to track uncertainty in hybrid-electric technology development and informs the generic plots in the extended abstract. Specific quantitative analysis and plots will be included in the final paper for the Dash 8 case study.