Energy Optimization Analysis of Turbofan Engine for More-Electric Civil Aircraft

The civil aviation industry is moving into the more-electric environment where the civil aircraft uses electricity to meet the multiple energy demands of the associated aircraft subsystems. The civil aircraft's turbofan engine, which is the largest energy supply system of civil aircraft, will thus utilize more fuel resource to provide increased electric energy besides of its conventional responsibility of maintaining the fundamental thrust requirements by aircraft. This will introduce new challenge for the energy optimization analysis of aircraft turbofan engine: it was nearly a simple optimal setting of engine's component parameters for keeping required thrust, but under the more-electric environment it will become an optimization problem in order to minimize the fuel consumption while obeying the multiple constraints by thermodynamic limits of turbofan engine and by varying electric power demands associated with the flight profile of aircraft. We present a complete modeling in this paper for the energy optimization analysis of turbofan engine for more-electric civil aircraft and formulate it as a nonlinear programming form. We propose an algorithm based on Benders decomposition method to solve this problem; the numerical results demonstrate the economic effectiveness of the proposed modeling and algorithm.