Impact of distributed electric propulsion technology on the performance of a four-person general aviation aircraft

With the increasing use of airplanes over the past years, the consumption of fossil fuels by airlines has increased exponentially. Therefore, in an attempt to decrease the dependence of fossil fuels, the possibility of using electric energy as the aircraft’s main power source has been studied in the past years. One distributed electric propulsion technology that can have a greater impact in the current small aircraft market is the Leading Edge Asynchronous Propellers Technology (LEAPTech). The purpose of this thesis is to allow to have a deeper understanding on the impact of a LEAPTech aircraft on the performance and flight profile of a current state-of-the-art combustion aircraft. In order to make this study, two softwares are used. Firstly, the main software in which almost all the analyses are made is SUAVE. The second software, which is used to build various surrogate models for the aerodynamic analysis is OpenVSP. With the utilization of these two softwares, the reference aircraft (Tecnam P2006T), its electric counterpart and a LEAPTech aircraft with 12 high-lift propellers were developed. All these aircraft configurations’ flight profiles were converged for their respective maximum range.Aerospace Engineering | Flight Performance and Propulsio