A Power Matching Approach for a Long Endurance Electric Airplane Design

Abstract

The unmanned aircraft industry is developing much safer lower noise and more efficient power technologies to sustain the transportation industry Electric motors have many advantages over internal combustion engines Some of these advantages include lower noise higher torque higher energy efficiency and lower maintenance costs For this reason hybrid electric powered drones are gradually becoming popular The main objective of this dissertation is to develop a set of procedures by integrating aircraft performance propeller performance and motor performance analysis program to optimize the dynamic matching of long endurance electric propeller aircraft The aircraft performance analysis uses the 2D-3D fast external flow field program to analyze the most energy-saving flight condition and its thrust requirement data Additionally the performance analysis of the propeller was carried out by a self-written blade element program Under the most energy-saving flight altitude airspeed and thrust demand conditions the variable propeller pitch was analyzed to obtain the best performance pitch angle For DC motor performance the electric propeller simulation was performed with a self-written steady-state aerodynamic load DC motor simulation program An analytical tool XFLR5 that has been recognized as a reliable and accurate program was used to analyze the external flow field of the aircraft Results of theblade element method and the self-contained steady-state aerodynamic load DC motor model program written in this study which also performs specific analysis of subsystem are compared with the experimental data to verify the satisfactory and the usefulness of the program Finally the DC motor velocity coefficient Kv and airplane flight speed Vc were chosen to proceed the conjugate direction optimum searching analysis to search the optimum performance of the whole airplane system The analysis tool using full physical models proposed in this thesis is different from that of the most current empirical models It is hoped that this study has an opportunity to make effective contributions to the design and application of various types of electric thrust vehicles

Date of Award	2019
Original language	English
Supervisor	Wei-Hsiang Lai (Supervisor)