Multidisciplinary Optimization of Hydrogen Fuel System Architectures for Conceptual Aircraft Design

Abstract

The pursuit of sustainable aviation has promoted the evaluation of alternative aircraft propulsion technologies, such as hydrogen fuel cells. In light of this, this study attempts to reduce the existing knowledge gap related to the fuel system of such aircraft, in order to assist decision making in the conceptual and preliminary design phases. For this purpose, system architecture optimization (SAO) is used to study the design space of the hydrogen fuel system of a fuel-cell-based regional airliner. The employed framework consists mainly of the ADORE, MDAx and RCE platforms. Together, these platforms enable the joint use of MBSE and MDO for the automatic exploration of architecture design spaces. In addition, CPACS is used as a central data schema. Using system mass and electric power consumption as performance metrics, the results show that the fuel system’s performance is strongly dependent on the type of heater used for the various heating functions of the system. Given this stark influence, other architectural decisions become less prominent. Among them are the type of insulation, type of pump, and the choice between a pressure driven and a pump driven system. Two different optimization approaches are compared, with surrogate-based optimization showing superior performance to that of the NSGA-II algorithm. The benefits of using an automated approach in the system architecting phase are quantified by comparing it to more conventional approaches. Significant time savings are achieved, as well as a more comprehensive design space exploration. This research demonstrates the use of system architecture optimization in a realistic engineering application. It also creates a foundation for the study of hydrogen fuel system architectures, which can be further developed to expand the system boundaries and conduct more extensive studies.