01.2 - Aircraft Design and Integrated System (Applications)
MIXED INTEGER NONLINEAR PROGRAMMING FOR EVTOL AIRCRAFT DESIGN AND OPTIMIZATION
T. Jiang¹, M. Li¹, Y. Liu¹, Y. Zheng¹; ¹School of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Zhejiang University, China
Electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft has great advantages in speed, efficiency and carbon emissions as compared to conventional helicopters or fixed-wing aircraft for urban air mobility (UAM), which seems to revolutionize both aviation industry and our daily commuting. As a key element of UAM, efficient eVTOL aircraft design and optimization is very important to the success of its adoption. The goal of this paper is to apply new design and optimization approach to eVTOL aircraft design for better energy efficiency. To enhance the overall aircraft level performance of the baseline eVTOL, we employ Mixed Integer Nonlinear Programming (MINLP) to include both continuous design variables and discrete design variables for eVTOL design space exploration. Our study has shown that for a given flight mission, the MINLP optimization can result in 25.5% total energy usage as compared to initial eVTOL design.