Onboard Energy Management

The increasingly aggressive performance targets for new aircraft designs that drive fuel efficiency, emissions, noise, cost, and operability requirements necessitate a renewed focus on optimal onboard energy management for the aircraft systems and subsystems. Optimal energy management, which has traditionally been considered local to each aircraft subsystem, is now being expanded to include interactions among multiple subsystems to better optimize overall aircraft performance. The progressive trend toward the use of novel electric subsystems both opens up attractive opportunities for such a synergistic consideration of vehicle-level energy optimality, and at the same time poses significant challenges of a technical and organizational nature. This chapter provides a broad overview of energy sources, types, and consumers for both conventional and novel subsystem architectures, identifying existing suboptimalities in energy utilization as well as opportunities and considerations for more effective total energy management. The technical and organizational challenges related to vehicle-level treatment of energy optimality and management that modern aircraft designers face are presented and discussed. Several energy management strategies for thermal and electric systems are described and evaluated. Keywords: subsystem architectures; More Electric Initiative; Non-propulsive power; All Electric Aircraft; More Electric Aircraft