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Completed TRL 1 (started at 1, targeting 5)
Hybridization of aircraft propulsion, which is particularly well-suited for single-aisle medium- and short-haul aircraft, offers significant benefits in reducing energy, carbon emissions, noise, maintenance cost, and operating cost. NASA has laid the foundation for a successful progression of hybrid electric propulsion systems that highlights the need to meet the challenges of smaller and highly efficient cores. The objective of the proposed work is to optimize the gas turbine design for hybrid electric propulsion.
The transformation to hybrid electric propulsion requires a co-optimized, rather than a siloed, approach across the component, engine, vehicle, and mission levels. This will enable innovative component-level hardware while simultaneously considering the hybrid system architecture. At the system level, identifying the component architectures that achieve optimal and safe performance, but take advantage of the full benefits of the broader hybrid system architecture is relatively new to the aviation industry. For example, given the fundamentally different operational profile required for the turbine in a hybrid system, significant opportunities exist to re-think the turbine and the combustor designs in light of an optimal hybrid system. Implementing advanced tools such additive manufacturing will also enable high risk advanced thermal management strategies while counteracting small core cost increases; integrated sensing will detect engine wear and enable advanced control approaches; and machine learning in cyber-physical modeling will facilitate system optimization. The research strategy identifies two highly coupled technical challenges to address: system level optimization to define the architecture and component sizes; and turbine component optimization with focused integration for small core engines.
This research addresses the challenges of small core turbo-machinery for hybrid electric propulsion (HEP) for single-aisle aircraft that is critical to reducing the carbon dioxide footprint of commercial aviation. The anticipated benefit of this effort is to optimize the turbine design for HEP aircraft to meet the turbine efficiencies equal to that of large cores and reduce the energy consumption of the turbine over the entire flight envelope.
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