Retrofit and New Design of Regional Aircraft with Hybrid Electric Propulsion

Despite the low noise and zero carbon emissions of electric propulsion aircraft, the low specific energy of batteries has limited the application of electric propulsion only to light aircraft. Via retrofit and new designs, the current study aims at studying and evaluating the overall aircraft level performance of hybrid electric propulsion (HEP) regional aircraft for feasible flight ranges. In this manuscript, a Harbin Y12F like regional turbo-prop aircraft with 19 passengers is chosen as baseline. For the retrofit design, only the conventional propulsion systems are sized to meet the power requirements for different hybridization levels as well as battery specific energy technology scenarios. For the new design, the aircraft planform parameters are also sized and together with the hybridization levels and battery technologies. For both cases, sensitivity studies of cruise flight speeds and cruise altitudes on the overall aircraft performance are carried out. In the end, the overall aircraft design level results such as MTOW and fuel burn for different scenarios are evaluated to explore the possible HEP design spaces.