Optimization of Subsystem Architectures for Hybrid Electric Propulsion on a Single-Aisle Commercial Aircraft

Small core turbofan engines promise engine size and weight reductions, yielding improvements in efficiency and fuel consumption. Similarly, studies investigating hybrid electric turbofans have shown improvements in fuel consumption over various mission profiles for large, single-aisle commercial aircraft, in-part, leveraging the new modes of operation that hybrid electric architectures enable. The purpose of the work presented here is to explore the potential benefits of hybrid electric technologies when combined with small core turbofan engines, employed in a tube-and-wing 150-passenger single aisle aircraft with a 2040 entry-intoservice (EIS) date. This research is the result of an ongoing NASA University Led Initiative (ULI), in collaboration with the Pennsylvania State University, Pratt & Whitney, and the RTX Technologies Research Center researchers, through which collaborations on component-level modeling and system-level architecting studies have been performed to support the completion of the vehicle design task. The purpose of this paper is to summarize the efforts and intermediate results as a consequence of the first two years of this effort.