CFD studies of an all-electric fuel cell based aircraft with integrated cooling design

Abstract

An all-electric fuel cell powertrain using liquid hydrogen for a short-range low-emission aircraft is being developed within the Clean Aviation project FAME. The present paper describes the generation of the initial version of the FAME full-scale aircraft platform as the basis for subsequent detailed integration studies. The aircraft is described with focus on the all-electric engine with integrated cooling ducts including heat exchangers. CFD simulations of the aircraft with and without modeled heat exchanger are presented to assess the impact of the cooling system on the aerodynamic performance. Hereby, an extension of the analysis capability using DLR TAU is presented by simulating integrated tilted heat exchangers with the Darcy-Forchheimer approach. The studies are concerned with the integration feasibility of the drive train, cooling ducts and heat exchangers, whereby the increased size of the engine cowling driven by the heat exchanger integration leads to a degradation of the aircrafts aerodynamic performance.