Concepts of Full-Electric and Hybrid-Electric Propulsion and Operation Risk Motivated Integrity Monitoring for Future Unmanned Cargo Aircraft

Besides lower environmental impact, full and hybrid-electric propulsion systems offer an opportunity to set-up a highly redundant powertrain. As safety is one of the important topics for the design of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), concepts of full-electric and hybrid-electric propulsion have been investigated in terms of meeting: mass, volume, power, energy and safety constraints. In the first step, the powertrain system has been sized according to preliminary design data described in the project Automated Low Altitude Air Delivery (ALAADy) using generic data of state-of-the-art system components. In the next steps the powertrain system has been analyzed and modelled with simulation models to investigate the system performance in more detail. Optimal powertrain system architectures concerning system overall mass and redundancy have been set up especially for the vehicles designed for the ALAADy project. The differences between full-electric and hybrid-electric powertrain systems is discussed as well.