Title: Exploiting the synergy between aircraft architecture and electric power system in unmanned aerial vehicle through many-objective optimisation

Authors: Teresa Donateo; Claudia Lucia De Pascalis; Antonio Ficarella

Addresses: Department of Engineering for Innovation, University of Salento, Via per Monteroni, 73100, Lecce, Italy ' Department of Engineering for Innovation, University of Salento, Via per Monteroni, 73100, Lecce, Italy ' Department of Engineering for Innovation, University of Salento, Via per Monteroni, 73100, Lecce, Italy

Abstract: This study addresses the preliminary design of a fixed-wing, tailsitter electric unmanned aerial vehicle (with vertical take-off and landing capability) by optimising the size of the powertrain components together with the main aircraft design specification. To this scope, different optimisation problems are considered, with two, three and four objective functions, respectively. The results of the optimisation are used not only to compare the performance of different optimisation algorithms when increasing the number of goals, but also to discuss the synergy between architecture and power systems optimisation.

Keywords: all electric aircraft; VTOL UAV; many-objective optimisation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSA.2018.098425

International Journal of Sustainable Aviation, 2018 Vol.4 No.3/4, pp.247 - 272

Received: 08 Sep 2018
Accepted: 29 Nov 2018
Published online: 22 Mar 2019 *

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