Modeling Hybrid-Electric Aircraft and their Fleet-Level CO₂ Emission Impacts

With rising concerns over commercial aviation’s contribution to global carbon emissions, there exists a tremendous pressure on the aviation industry to find advanced technological solutions to reduce its share of CO2 emissions. Single-aisle (or narrowbody) aircraft are the biggest contributors to CO2 emissions by number of operations, insisting a need to reduce / eliminate their aircraft-level fuel consumption as soon as possible. A potential solution for this is to operate fully-electric single-aisle aircraft; however, the limitations of the current (and predicted future) battery technology is forcing the industry to explore hybrid-electric aircraft as a possible mid-term solution. Modeling hybrid-electric aircraft comes with its own challenges due to the presence of two different propulsion sources – gas turbine engines (powered by Jet-A fuel) and electric motors (powered by batteries). Since traditional sizing approaches and legacy sizing tools do not seem to work well for hybrid-electric aircraft, this work presents a “flight-mechanics-based” conceptual sizing tool for hybrid-electric aircraft, set up as a Multidisciplinary Design Optimization (MDO) toolbox. Some of the key features of the sizing tool include concurrently sizing the electric motors and downsizing the gas turbine engines while meeting the one-engine-inoperative (OEI) and top-of-climb constraints, and re-sizing the fuselage to account for the volumetric constraints associated with required batteries. Current work considers a parallel hybrid-electric single-aisle aircraft with a 900 nmi design range, with electric power augmentation (with electric motors operating at full throttle) available only for the takeoff and climb segments when sizing the aircraft. Four hybrid-electric propulsion technology cases are considered, and the resulting hybrid-electric aircraft show 15.0% to 22.5% reduction in fuel burn compared to a Boeing 737-800 aircraft. Another challenge with modeling hybrid-electric aircraft is determining their off-design performance characteristics (considering a different payload or mission range, or both). This work presents an energy management tool – set up as a nonlinear programming optimization problem – to minimize the fuel burn for a payload-range combination by identifying the optimal combination of throttle settings for the gas turbine engines and the electric motors during takeoff, climb, and cruise, along with identifying an optimal flight path. The energy management tool enables fuel savings of at least of 2%, with actual savings ranging from 142.1 lbs to 276.1 lbs per trip for a sample route (LGA–ORD) at a 80% load factor. Although the hybrid-electric aircraft sizing and performance analysis studies show encouraging results about the potential reduction in carbon emissions at an aircraft level, the future fleet-level carbon emissions are not expected to reduce proportionally to these aircraft level emission reductions. This work predicts the fleet-level environmental impacts of future single-aisle parallel hybrid-electric aircraft by modeling the behavior of a profit-seeking airline (with a mixture of conventional all Jet-A fuel burning and hybrid electric aircraft in its fleet) using the Fleet-Level Environmental Evaluation Tool (FLEET). FLEET’s model-based predictions rely upon historically-based information about US-touching airline routes and passenger demand served by US flag-carrier airlines from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics to initiate model-based predictions of future demand, aircraft fleet mix, and aircraft operations. Using the aircraft performance coefficients from the energy management tool to represent the behavior of a single-aisle parallel hybrid-electric aircraft, the FLEET simulation predicts the changes in the fleet-wide carbon emissions due to the introduction of this new aircraft in an airline fleet in the year 2035. By 2055, FLEET results predict that the fleet-wide CO2 emissions with hybrid-electric aircraft in the fleet mix are at least 1.2% lower than the fleet-wide CO2 emissions of a conventional (all Jet-A fuel burning) aircraft-only airline. The rather limited reduction in emissions is an attribute of the reduced range capability and higher operating cost of the hybrid-electric aircraft (relative to a conventional aircraft of similar size). This causes the airline to change the usage, acquisition and retirement of its conventional aircraft when hybrid-electric aircraft are available; this is most notable to serve passenger demand on certain predominantly single-aisle service routes that cannot be flown by the future single-aisle hybrid-electric aircraft.