Preliminary Design of Fuel Cell Hybrid-Electric Power-Train for a Fixed-Wing Drone

Hybrid-electric aircraft have been studied in recent years, aiming to contribute in reducing pollutant aviation emissions. Analysis and design of hybrid power-trains able to substitute conventional systems in actual aircraft have given rise to several approach strategies, combined with simulation tools. Since the hybrid-electric power-train is composed of several subsystems that exhibit non-linear behavior in their energy conversion, calculating its basic characteristics to optimally substitute the original system is a highly complex task. Employing reliable simulation tools for each of these subsystems is a valuable approach for this task. Present work analyzes the convenience and viability of converting into hybrid an actual fixed-wing drone from a Brazilian manufacturer. The approach models each subsystem of the current and proposed hybrid aircraft with their power-trains, employing reliable and available simulation tools. Aircraft is simulated in SUAVE and OpenVSP [1], propeller in QBlade [2], internal combustion engine (ICE) in Diesel-RK [3], and electrical components in MATLAB
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/Simulink
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. Two topologies were studied for the hybrid motor: one with a series configuration including an internal combustion engine (ICE), power electronic converters (PEC), and batteries; and another with a turbo-electric configuration using a proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) as the power source. Assuming steady state conditions, the numerical results of these simulations were transformed into polynomial equations that model the energy transformations in each subsystem throughout the mission, rendering the mission fuel consumption in each of the studied configurations. These computations were developed in MATLAB
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, varying the dimensions of batteries and other devices to find the optimal specification. Results indicate the second studied topology showed a better performance.