Propulsion System for BWB Configurations in the Agile project

The focus of the present paper is the preliminary design of the propulsion and on-board systems and their integration for a Blended Wing Body (BWB) aircraft. The propulsion and on-board systems could deeply affect the aircraft performance and their weights. The aim is to consider all the main peculiarity of the BWB configuration affecting these systems. The innovative collaborative MDO process developed within the EU funded H2020 AGILE project is employed. Two configurations of BWB with different type of propulsion systems but with the same Top Level Aircraft Requirements (TLARs) are analyzed. The former has a conventional podded engine configuration while the latter is characterized by Distributed Propulsion System (DPS) and Boundary Layer Ingestion (BLI) system. Preliminary analyses about these two configurations are presented, showing the impacts of these alternative configurations on propulsion (fuel consumption, performance) and on-board systems (masses, power off-takes)