This will be the world’s first electric commercial aircraft

The German space agency DLR has presented the final design of a short-haul electric hybrid aircraft with 100 seats and ten propeller engines distributed in the wings.

The joint SynergIE project is supported by Airbus and Rolls Royce and is funded by the German government. The goal is to develop aircraft that can successfully operate commercially with significantly lower emissions and less noise pollution.

With this technology, the propulsion system is distributed over the entire span of the wings, leading to a

As a final design for a distributed hybrid-electric propulsion aircraft, the researchers selected and evaluated a concept with turbo generators in the fuselage and 10 electric motors along the leading edge of the wing as the best solution among the various possible configurations.

The optimal design and installation of the propellers allows to reduce the chord of the wing and the size of the rudder, thus reducing energy consumption by approximately 10%.

“The special arrangement of the propellers allows us to compensate for the weight disadvantages of the hybrid-electric propulsion system”, says Martin Hepperle of the DLR Institute for Aerodynamics and Flow Technology in a statement. “We were also able to design the vertical stabilizer to be smaller and therefore lighter and with less resistance in our multi-engine concept.” keep going. “This concept can even compensate for the failure of two electric motors; therefore it also offers

During the first virtual flight in the DLR Air Vehicle Simulator (AVES), DLR test pilots evaluated the flight characteristics of the short-haul electric hybrid aircraft.

Particularly during the approach to landing, it became clear that the aerodynamic interaction between the propeller waves and the wings strongly influences the flight characteristics of the aircraft. To compensate for the reduced effectiveness of the smaller rudder and vertical stabilizer, a research team from the Institute of Flight Systems developed a flight controller that enables control of yaw (rotation about the vertical axis) using the rudder combined with differential thrust. .

In the SynergIE project, participants developed and established a universal ‘software simulation toolchain’ for future aircraft designs with distributed hybrid electric propulsion systems in DLR, for the purpose of and the German industry.

The interdisciplinary work includes the integrated aerodynamics of the wing and propellers in close interaction with issues of flight mechanics for control, as well as the boundary conditions of the structure and aeroelasticity. In the future, outstanding questions about the aeroacoustics of distributed propellers and the optimal flap systems for landing approaches will be resolved.

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