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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Flight Dynamics Modeling for a Rapid Conceptual Development Environment

This paper presents the integration of flight dynamics modeling (FDM) within an aircraft conceptual development framework. Within this framework, FDM and simulation are used for the preliminary analysis of the takeoff, landing, and critical loss of thrust performance of early-stage aircraft concepts. The aerodynamic and propulsive models are built using the XML-based DAVE-ML model exchange. Automated integration of these models is achieved using the Simulink® model generation available through the DAVEtools Java package in addition to Simulink®-based flight simulation blocks. Results demonstrating the established methods are presented for the analysis of a twin-engine light transport example aircraft. This work establishes methods that will be used to perform trade studies of aircraft designed for Regional Air Mobility operations. These aircraft will require short takeoff and landing distances in addition to steep climb and descent gradients, each of which can be estimated and applied as design space constraints using the current methods.

Flight Dynamics↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

A Call To Action To Engage The Community To Meet The Challenges That Must Be Tackled To Make Electrified Aircraft Propulsion Real

Technology risk reduction is essential, as it is necessary to demonstrate the potential of Electrified Aircraft Propulsion (EAP). However, more is needed for implementation. The industry is leading EAP by developing a diverse community of novel vehicles from short-haul, small, urban-focused electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) to regional air mobility (RAM) and hybrid-electric, single-aisle transport category airplanes. There are a variety of novel EAP technologies for each of these novel vehicles. And the industry is not only looking at novel technology to advance the state of the art. Instead, the industry is looking to certify these novel aircraft through their regulatory authorities, such as the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the European Union Aviation Safety Authority (EASA), Transport Canada Civil Aviation (TCCA), and Brazil’s Agência Nacional de Aviação Civil (National Civil Aviation Agency, ANAC), as well as other regulatory authorities. The NASA Electrified Powertrain Flight Demonstration (EPFD) project has partnered with two industry partners to advance integrated MW-class powertrain system technology demonstration that includes an assessment of their regulatory and standards gaps in their technology. The EPFD has conducted a generic regulatory gap analysis of hybrid electric engines that aligns with the industry partners’ efforts. The EPFD regulations and standards team is integrated into the industry standards community. The international industry standards community is wrestling with critical key challenges to certification. While some certification elements are proprietary, several technology elements cut across company propriety in aircraft engines (US 14 CFR Part 33 and EASA CS-E, regulations that only reflect reciprocating and turbine engines). The approach that several of these regulatory authorities have taken is to collaborate to address their challenges. The Certification Management Team (CMT) consists of the EASA, FAA, TCCA, and ANAC, and they have begun to address common questions, such as the Loss of Power Control (LOPC) for electric engines. They have reached out to the standards community to seek answers. The industry standards development organizations (SDO) have also looked ahead to address current regulations and standards gaps. The ASTM has built key committees in its ASTM F44 General Aviation Committee and F39 Aircraft Systems Committee. The SAE has established the E-40 Electric Propulsion and AE-10 High Voltage committees.

Standards↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

A Call To Action To Engage The Community To Meet The Challenges That Must Be Tackled To Make Electrified Aircraft Propulsion Real

Technology risk reduction is essential, as it is necessary to demonstrate the potential of Electrified Aircraft Propulsion (EAP). However, more is needed for implementation. The industry is leading EAP by developing a diverse community of novel vehicles from short-haul, small, urban-focused electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) to regional air mobility (RAM) and hybrid-electric, single-aisle transport category airplanes. There are a variety of novel EAP technologies for each of these novel vehicles. And the industry is not only looking at novel technology to advance the state of the art. Instead, the industry is looking to certify these novel aircraft through their regulatory authorities, such as the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the European Union Aviation Safety Authority (EASA), Transport Canada Civil Aviation (TCCA), and Brazil’s Agência Nacional de Aviação Civil (National Civil Aviation Agency, ANAC), as well as other regulatory authorities. The NASA Electrified Powertrain Flight Demonstration (EPFD) project has partnered with two industry partners to advance integrated MW-class powertrain system technology demonstration that includes an assessment of their regulatory and standards gaps in their technology. The EPFD has conducted a generic regulatory gap analysis of hybrid electric engines that aligns with the industry partners’ efforts. The EPFD regulations and standards team is integrated into the industry standards community. The international industry standards community is wrestling with critical key challenges to certification. While some certification elements are proprietary, several technology elements cut across company propriety in aircraft engines (US 14 CFR Part 33 and EASA CS-E, regulations that only reflect reciprocating and turbine engines). The approach that several of these regulatory authorities have taken is to collaborate to address their challenges. The Certification Management Team (CMT) consists of the EASA, FAA, TCCA, and ANAC, and they have begun to address common questions, such as the Loss of Power Control (LOPC) for electric engines. They have reached out to the standards community to seek answers. The industry standards development organizations (SDO) have also looked ahead to address current regulations and standards gaps. The ASTM has built key committees in its ASTM F44 General Aviation Committee and F39 Aircraft Systems Committee. The SAE has established the E-40 Electric Propulsion and AE-10 High Voltage committees.

Standards↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

A Parametric Battery Model for the Conceptual Design of Electric Aircraft

Electric aircraft conceptual designs usually have an assumed specific power and specific energy for the aircraft’s energy storage system that dictates the total capacity and the peak power available. The specific energy and power are inherently linked to the state-of-charge and discharge rate from which they were derived; therefore, they will not directly correspond to the diverse circumstances encountered in various aircraft missions and flight segments. These parameters turn the battery system into a black box, disregard potential electrical restrictions, and disallow the aircraft and battery to be optimized as a system. Peering into this box, this study highlights the importance of incorporating a parametric battery model into the conceptual design workflow by splitting high-level terms such as power into voltage and current and investigating their variability during the discharge process. Through the modeling of these more detailed parameters, this methodology shows the feasibility of using low states-of-charge for contingency operations, including the end of the reserve mission, expanding the amount of usable capacity for electric aircraft. Stark differences in aircraft capabilities can arise between varying fidelity battery models due to late-mission, high-power flight operations. This parametric battery model effectively captures these differences by evaluating the limitations that arise within the individual battery cells and the aircraft powertrain. This paper shows that the unusable charge of a battery is set by the balked landing power requirement and can realistically range from 5% to 44% based on assumptions. This sets the analog to unusable fuel capacity in aircraft with liquid fuel systems. Needing only aircraft- and mission-level inputs and only seconds of run time, this model is a prime fit for the fast, accurate exploration of the electric aircraft conceptual design space.

Battery↗
NASA NTRS2025

Airports as Energy Nodes Activity Summary

Advanced aircraft concepts that use non-traditional aviation energy storage methods such as batteries or cryogenic hydrogen are in development and expected to enter regular service at airports worldwide within the next decade. The energy needs for these aircraft may quickly overwhelm the existing energy infrastructure at airports, particularly at smaller and more remote facilities. Without energy upgrades, these airports will not be able to host these advanced vehicles, but without the advanced vehicle traffic, these airports will not have the rationale or funding to build up their energy infrastructure. The Airports as Energy Nodes (ÆNodes) activity, a collaboration between the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), was executed to understand and model the energy needs that advanced aircraft concepts may levy on these smaller airports, determine cost-effective approaches to enhance the airport energy infrastructure, and demonstrate the enhanced resilience of these energy infrastructure upgrades to the airport and surrounding community via “digital twin” simulation at relevant energy and dynamic time scales. The ÆNodes team also investigated future reference aircraft designs and materials to enable cryogenic hydrogen storage for aircraft. The ÆNodes team conducted analysis at two U.S. airport partner sites — Winchester Regional Airport in Winchester, Virginia, and Tweed/New Haven Airport in New Haven, Connecticut. The goal of this partnership was to develop data and reference infrastructure designs that could accommodate advanced aircraft in the future at these airports while also enhancing the resiliency of the energy supply to the surrounding airport community, which could be used to capture funding to enable the infrastructure upgrades. Over the course of the study, a method was developed to estimate air traffic requiring advanced energy services over the course of a year using a mix of historical data and companion studies on advanced aircraft transportation networks. The study has concluded at NASA but continues at NREL, who will develop a final report discussing the energy infrastructure upgrades and digital twin results. Preliminary results indicate that unrestricted adoption of advanced battery-electric aircraft may double traffic at these airports and increase peak daily power usage by an order of magnitude, while increase electricity energy needs by a factor of two to four. The infrastructure upgrades necessary to accommodate these increased energy needs could be used to provide enhanced energy services to the airport community to offset the cost and increase the utility of the upgrades, which will be described in the NREL final report.

Airports↗
NASA NTRS2004

Transportation Network Topologies

A discomforting reality has materialized on the transportation scene: our existing air and ground infrastructures will not scale to meet our nation's 21st century demands and expectations for mobility, commerce, safety, and security. The consequence of inaction is diminished quality of life and economic opportunity in the 21st century. Clearly, new thinking is required for transportation that can scale to meet to the realities of a networked, knowledge-based economy in which the value of time is a new coin of the realm. This paper proposes a framework, or topology, for thinking about the problem of scalability of the system of networks that comprise the aviation system. This framework highlights the role of integrated communication-navigation-surveillance systems in enabling scalability of future air transportation networks. Scalability, in this vein, is a goal of the recently formed Joint Planning and Development Office for the Next Generation Air Transportation System. New foundations for 21PstP thinking about air transportation are underpinned by several technological developments in the traditional aircraft disciplines as well as in communication, navigation, surveillance and information systems. Complexity science and modern network theory give rise to one of the technological developments of importance. Scale-free (i.e., scalable) networks represent a promising concept space for modeling airspace system architectures, and for assessing network performance in terms of scalability, efficiency, robustness, resilience, and other metrics. The paper offers an air transportation system topology as framework for transportation system innovation. Successful outcomes of innovation in air transportation could lay the foundations for new paradigms for aircraft and their operating capabilities, air transportation system architectures, and airspace architectures and procedural concepts. The topology proposed considers air transportation as a system of networks, within which strategies for scalability of the topology may be enabled by technologies and policies. In particular, the effects of scalable ICNS concepts are evaluated within this proposed topology. Alternative business models are appearing on the scene as the old centralized hub-and-spoke model reaches the limits of its scalability. These models include growth of point-to-point scheduled air transportation service (e.g., the RJ phenomenon and the 'Southwest Effect'). Another is a new business model for on-demand, widely distributed, air mobility in jet taxi services. The new businesses forming around this vision are targeting personal air mobility to virtually any of the thousands of origins and destinations throughout suburban, rural, and remote communities and regions. Such advancement in air mobility has many implications for requirements for airports, airspace, and consumers. These new paradigms could support scalable alternatives for the expansion of future air mobility to more consumers in more places.

Holmes, Bruce J.↗
NASA NTRS2004

Transportation Network Topologies

A discomforting reality has materialized on the transportation scene: our existing air and ground infrastructures will not scale to meet our nation's 21st century demands and expectations for mobility, commerce, safety, and security. The consequence of inaction is diminished quality of life and economic opportunity in the 21st century. Clearly, new thinking is required for transportation that can scale to meet to the realities of a networked, knowledge-based economy in which the value of time is a new coin of the realm. This paper proposes a framework, or topology, for thinking about the problem of scalability of the system of networks that comprise the aviation system. This framework highlights the role of integrated communication-navigation-surveillance systems in enabling scalability of future air transportation networks. Scalability, in this vein, is a goal of the recently formed Joint Planning and Development Office for the Next Generation Air Transportation System. New foundations for 21st thinking about air transportation are underpinned by several technological developments in the traditional aircraft disciplines as well as in communication, navigation, surveillance and information systems. Complexity science and modern network theory give rise to one of the technological developments of importance. Scale-free (i.e., scalable) networks represent a promising concept space for modeling airspace system architectures, and for assessing network performance in terms of scalability, efficiency, robustness, resilience, and other metrics. The paper offers an air transportation system topology as framework for transportation system innovation. Successful outcomes of innovation in air transportation could lay the foundations for new paradigms for aircraft and their operating capabilities, air transportation system architectures, and airspace architectures and procedural concepts. The topology proposed considers air transportation as a system of networks, within which strategies for scalability of the topology may be enabled by technologies and policies. In particular, the effects of scalable ICNS concepts are evaluated within this proposed topology. Alternative business models are appearing on the scene as the old centralized hub-and-spoke model reaches the limits of its scalability. These models include growth of point-to-point scheduled air transportation service (e.g., the RJ phenomenon and the Southwest Effect). Another is a new business model for on-demand, widely distributed, air mobility in jet taxi services. The new businesses forming around this vision are targeting personal air mobility to virtually any of the thousands of origins and destinations throughout suburban, rural, and remote communities and regions. Such advancement in air mobility has many implications for requirements for airports, airspace, and consumers. These new paradigms could support scalable alternatives for the expansion of future air mobility to more consumers in more places.

Holmes, Bruce J.↗
NASA NTRS2019

NASA Electrified Aircraft Propulsion Efforts

NASA's broad investments in Electrified Aircraft Propulsion (EAP) are reviewed in this paper. NASA investments are guided by an assessment of potential market impacts, technical key performance parameters, and technology readiness attained through a combination of studies, enabling fundamental research, and flight research. NASA has determined that the impact of EAP varies by market and NASA is considering three markets: national/international, on-demand mobility, and short haul regional air transport. Flight research is underway to demonstrate integrated solutions and inform standards and certification processes. This paper focuses on the vehicle related activities, however there are related NASA activities in air space management and vehicle autonomy activities as well as a breakthrough technology project called the Convergent Aeronautics Solutions Project. A key finding is that sufficient technical advances in key areas have been made which indicate EAP is a viable technology for aircraft. Significant progress has been made to reduce EAP adoption barriers and further work is needed to transition the technology to a commercial product and improve the technology so it is applicable to large transonic aircraft. This paper will review the activities of the Hybrid Gas Electric Subproject of the Advanced Air Transport Technology Project, the Revolutionary Vertical Lift Technology Project, and the X-57 Flight Demonstration Project, and discuss the potential EAP benefits for commercial and military applications.

Jansen, Ralph H.↗
NASA NTRS2020

Open Advanced Air Mobility Project Vertiport and Route Decision Support Tool

The expected rise of Urban Air Mobility (UAM) presents local and regional planners with unique challenges. Aviation-based urban transportation requires analysis of new planning factors in addition to traditional factors. For example, the planner must be able to analyze community impacts (e.g. aircraft noise) and restrictions (e.g. airspace restrictions, terrain avoidance). This presentation presents a software modeling tool to address these planning challenges.

Shapiro, David L.↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

NASA Advanced Air Mobility (AAM)

This presentation will provide a UTM update, AAM overview (including details on the AAM Ecosystem Working Groups), and Regional Modeling and Simulations tool description.

Advance Air Mobility↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

SimUAM: A Comprehensive Microsimulation Toolchain to Evaluate the Impact of Urban Air Mobility in Metropolitan Areas

Over the past several years, Urban Air Mobility (UAM) has galvanized enthusiasm from investors and researchers, marrying expertise in aircraft design, transportation, logistics, artificial intelligence, battery chemistry, and broader policymaking. However, two significant questions remain unexplored: (1) What is the value of UAM in a region’s transportation network?, and (2) How can UAM be effectively deployed to realize and maximize this value to all stakeholders, including riders and local economies? To adequately understand the value proposition of UAM for metropolitan areas, we develop a holistic multi-modal toolchain, SimUAM, to model and simulate UAM and its impacts on travel behavior. This toolchain has several components: (1) MANTA: A fast, high-fidelity regional-scale traffic microsimulator, (2) VertiSim: A granular, discrete-event vertiport and pedestrian, (3) 3: A high-fidelity, trajectory-based aerial microsimulation. SimUAM, rooted in granular, GPU-based microsimulation, models millions of trips and their exact movements in the street network and in the air, producing interpretable and actionable performance metrics for UAM designs and deployments. The modularity, extensibility, and speed of the platform will allow for rapid scenario planning and sensitivity analysis, effectively acting as a detailed performance assessment tool. As a result, stakeholders in UAM can understand the impacts of critical infrastructure, and subsequently define policies, requirements, and investments needed to support UAM as a viable transportation mode.

Urban air mobility↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Design and Fabrication of the Langley Aerodrome No. 8 - Distributed Electric Propulsion VTOL Testbed

The Langley Aerodrome No. 8 (LA-8) is a distributed electric propulsion, vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) aircraft that is being used for wind tunnel testing and free flight testing at the NASA Langley Research Center. The intent of the LA-8 project is to provide a low-cost, modular test bed for technologies in the area of Advanced Air Mobility which includes electric urban and short regional flight. The methods used on the LA-8 provide a rapid means to verify aerodynamic, acoustic, and flight dynamics analysis of new electric VTOL and short takeoff and landing (STOL) designs. In addition, the flight vehicle will be used to help develop test processes for FAA flight vehicle airworthiness certification and for the development of robust flight control algorithms that are tolerant of failures. A new approach is being used on test vehicle design that makes extensive use of 3-D printing. Although materials used in 3-D printing have less strength than traditional materials used for NASA’s wind tunnel and flight models, strategic placement of load-carrying structures allows the aircraft to meet structural criteria while also enabling easy changes to be made in the vehicle design, such as the outer mold line. Modularity of the vehicle’s main components allows rapid changes to the vehicle configuration for comparative evaluation of alternate designs. Finally, a description is given of detailed inertia measurements of the flight vehicle using compound pendulum swing methods.

Urban air mobility↗
NASA NTRS2023

Vertiport Dynamic Density

Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) is envisioned to be another spoke in a region’s transportation system, supplementing ground-based travel with air-based travel. Eventually, air taxis will be pervasive, convenient, and affordable. As demand and operations tempo increase, congestion may arise. Several characteristics of AAM reduce the applicability of techniques used in today’s National Airspace System (NAS) to manage congestion. AAM will include both scheduled and non-scheduled, on-demand operations, challenging strategic deconfliction algorithms. Flights will be fairly short, traversing an urban area, not hundreds or thousands of miles, with corresponding low energy reserves, prohibiting excessive delays. Flight operators will need flexibility in operations, scheduling a flight only minutes before departure, or diverting to an alternate vertiport if it becomes advantageous, further adding to trajectory uncertainty that would challenge strategic deconfliction. Finally, operators will desire privacy to protect sensitive information or preserve competitive advantage, limiting early access to intent information. In this paper, we present an approach for managing congestion at vertiports by providing insight into the traffic situation to support operationally-advantageous and safe land or divert decisions. We propose a metric designed with usefulness and usability in AAM operations in mind. The metric uses the sociology concept of dynamic density (DD) that takes into consideration not only number of flights, but also the interaction of those flights with the vertiport’s limited resources, namely the landing pads and the parking spots. DD supports a Pilot in Command (PIC) with decisions about whether to proceed, expedite, delay, or divert; and supports air traffic control (ATC) and vertiport operators in airspace management and vertiport usage. We demonstrate the metric on a notional vertiport scenario. We also show that DD provides better insight into congestion and resulting flight delays than an aircraft count metric used in traditional air traffic management.

Lilly Spirkovska↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Origins and Chemical Characteristics of a Plume Observed on 31 August 2019 by the Langley Mobile Ozone Lidar During the FIREX-AQ Field Campaign

During the Fire Influence on Regional to Global Environments and Air Quality (FIREX-AQ) field campaign, the Langley Mobile Ozone Lidar (LMOL) observed an aerosol plume over Hampton, VA between 0000–1200 UTC on August 31, 2019. This plume is of interest because it did not have any associated ozone (O3) and was only observable in LMOL’s new aerosol backscatter product derived while performing the aerosol correction procedure (Leietal.,2021). Here we investigate the origins and evolution of the chemical composition throughout the plume’s lifetime. This study also evaluates LMOL’s new aerosol capability, which allows us to better identify and understand smoke plumes.

Daniel B Phoenix↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Regional Modeling and Simulation for Vertiport Location Assessment

There is increasing interest in the Urban Air Mobility concept and the realization of electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing (e-VTOL) vehicles flying in the National Airspace System. NASA, FAA, and the industry are investigating various aspects of this new mode of transportation for cargo and humans. There are significant challenges in making this mode a reality, including feasibility, safety, infrastructure, traffic management, public acceptance, and scalability. From the infrastructure perspective, one of the aspects that needs to be addressed is the location of vertiports (named similar to heliports, for vertical take-off and landing vehicles). There is significant on-going research for selecting location of vertiports. However, the locations are largely based on demand models. Also, these efforts are focused in specific local regions, San Francisco/Bay Area, Chicago, Tampa, etc. This talk presents an approach to determine the location of vertiports in regional areas (across the United States), incorporating the desire to have certain attributes closer to or further from the location using a regional modeling tool. The feasibility of flying e-VTOL vehicles between various vertiport locations is also presented using a mobility operations simulation tool.

Air Mobility↗
NASA NTRS2021

Advanced Air Mobility and Safety Management Systems

Our current air transportation system has underserved markets, including local, regional, intraregional, and urban transportation of both people and cargo. Recent advances in aviation technology such as small highly-automated vehicles, electric aircraft, and automated air traffic are enabling business opportunities in these markets. Advanced Air Mobility, or AAM, refers to a community effort to overcome the gaps in operational rules, safety analysis, and overall acceptance, so that these new operations will be possible. For full details, please see: https://www.nasa.gov/aam As we think about how we can safely introduce these new operations, fundamental questions about how the structure of Safety Management Systems can be applied to AAM, and how that structure can be used to help us overcome the necessary technical and societal obstacles arise. Two of these questions are: • How do we tailor the requirements and desired level of monitoring and assessment to achieve safety given the breadth of possible operations and the associated risk of those operations? • How do we aid innovation by rapidly evaluating the safety of novel operations without losing associated rigor? We assume that a Safety Management System that enables these future systems will incorporate knowledge of the acceptable level of risk, and will utilize data science to automate the core monitor, assess and mitigate functions that will allow us to respond to risks and hazards in time to prevent safety incidents. In 2018, the National Academies proposed an In-Time Aviation Safety Management System (IASMS) that would advance these goals. (https://www.nap.edu/catalog/24962/in-time-aviation-safety-management-challenges-and-research-for-an) The National Academies made a clear distinction between in-time systems, in which hazards could be identified and risks mitigated in time to prevent incidents, and real-time systems, since many hazards and risks do not need real-time data and analysis to detect and mitigate.

In-Time Aviation Safety Management System↗
NASA NTRS2021

m:N and Human Autonomy Teaming Concepts for High Density Vertiport Operations

This report focuses on the role of the Fleet Manager (FM) and, in particular, the ways in which automation could support their position as they manage multiple aircraft and operators in a highly dynamic, advanced air mobility (e.g., air taxi) environment, specifically "high-density vertiport" (HDV) regions. Similar to terminal area operations for traditional aviation, operations involving HDVs will need to be highly structured while also remaining resilient to the various contingencies that can happen in that environment. The role of the FM is consistent with an “m:N” architecture, where “m” number of operators cooperatively manage “N” number of vehicles (where “N” is always larger than “m”). In such a paradigm it is critical to provide the operator with the tools and information necessary to manage their fleet safely and navigate the known pitfalls with highly automated, complex systems (e.g., brittleness, insufficient situation awareness, skill degradation). As the field of m:N has expanded as an area of study, a set of higher-level automation concepts have emerged—namely “plays,” “working agreements,” and “human-autonomy teaming” (HAT)—that could support operators in this new role.

human autonomy teaming↗