that today there’s a lot of heat in a gas
turbine that’s under our traditional
tube and wing aircraft, that heat
basically gets exhausted through the
exhaust of the gas turbine, and gets
managed in a very simple way.
“Once we start integrating power
electronics and batteries into the
aircraft, we need to manage the
thermal challenges in a much more
integrated way with the aircraft and
find ways to use that excess heat to
do things like wing anti-ice, where we
really take advantage of essentially the
thermal losses in the system.”
That will likely mean a future
electrically-powered airliner looks
radically different to the winged
cylinder we see today.
“We’re investigating a lot of aircraft
designs for the future, both standard
tube and wing and other designs,”
Boeing’s Droney says. “For example,
Boeing believes the Blended Wing
Body vehicle concept we’ve been
working on since the 1990s could be
developed into a product in the next
10 to 15 years as a subsonic transport,
and initial applications could include
military cargo vehicles. We’ve
conducted successful structures, flight
and wind tunnel tests unparalleled in
industry and we continue to refine and
improve the concept.”
On the material science side of
things, Droney notes, “Boeing is
focusing our near-term technology
development efforts in several
focused material areas including
thermosets, thermoplastics, resin
infusion, direct digital manufacturing,
hybrid composite structures,
metallic materials and processes,
mixed metallic and ceramic additive
manufacturing and ultra-high
temperature ceramics.”The Airbus-led E-Fan X partnership
builds on existing work to reach the
two megawatt threshold
Airbus is working with Rolls-Royce
and Siemens to produce E-Fan X, a
regional airliner-sized hybrid-electric
demonstrator using a modified
BAe 146, to show that shorter flights
with serious numbers of passengers
will be possible in the near future.
Airbus will build the energy storage
systems, carry out test flights, and
supervise overall integration. Siemens
will be responsible for the energy
distribution system within the aircraft,
as well as the electric motor for the
inverter, while Rolls-Royce will supplythe electrical power for the propulsion
system via a 2.5MW turbine with
integrated generator. First flight is
expected in 2020.
“We believe that we are actually
entering and opening the door
to the new world of aviation,”
Dr Frank Anton, head of Siemens’
eAircraft department said after the
E-Fan X’s formal launch, at the Royal
Aeronautical Society in London on
November 28.
“This will be disruptive innovation.
It will be as disruptive as the
introduction of the gas turbine from
the forties. It will be as disruptive as
the introduction of the fan in the late
sixties. And what we saw in the late
sixties was that aviation relatively
quickly took this new technology of
the turbine fan and that it very quickly
became the propulsion system for
aviation.
“So we could think that even this
new technology of hybrid electric
propulsion might, if it really shows
a benefit, equally quickly go into
aviation and make another disruptive
evolution of the propulsion of aircraft.”
Mark Cousin, Airbus’s head of
demonstrators, notes that, “Airbus has a
history in electric flights, which startedE-Fan X
Boeing’s X-48B scale Blended
Wing Body demonstrator could
point to a future of radically
different looking electrically-
powered aircraft.NASA‘The BAe
146 is really
the only
platform that
meets that
requirement.’
MARK COUSIN