A comparative study of different propulsion models for hybrid electric aircraft

This paper addresses the topic of multidisciplinary analysis (MDA) applied to hybrid electric aircraft (HEA) design focusing on the analysis of multi-fidelity models for hybrid electric powertrain design. The motivation behind this work is the retrofit of a turboprop aircraft with hybrid electric propulsion system. An adapted MDA for multi-fidelity conceptual aircraft design is set in place for the evaluation of the aircraft performance with a hybrid electric propulsion architecture. For the gas turbine system, high fidelity data have been used to develop multi-fidelity models with different levels of detail and complexity. These models have been integrated into the MDA to evaluate the performance of the vehicle for a given mission. Fuel consumption is the main metric used to assess the aircraft performance in the presence of uncertainty introduced on each propulsion model.