Parametric Modeling of the Aircraft Electrical Supply System for overall Conceptual Systems Design

Owing to the ongoing endeavor to gradually improve aircraft operational efficiency with the use of electrified on-board system concepts, computational modeling of the electric power supply system (EPSS) is becoming an even more important element of the system design process. The rising complexity innate to the early decision for an optimal system layout of such a More Electric Aircraft makes it necessary to use integrated and physics-based system models to study most promising concepts from an overall systems and aircraft level perspective. In this paper, a parametric model of the EPSS is presented, which is implemented into the overall systems design environment GeneSys. The parametric approach of the proposed method not only allows to evaluate promising architecture variants but also has the flexibility to study the effect of topological design decisions (positioning, routing) on system-level metrics. This includes routines for knowledge-based and automated generation of the EPSS topology based on parametric geometry information of the aircraft. In addition, a component-based system sizing and steady-state simulation process is used to estimate mass and electric load profile of the system for a given flight trajectory. To demonstrate the implemented model, the result of three exemplary topology studies are discussed.