Increasing Aeronautic Electric Propulsion Performances by Cogeneration and Heat Recovery

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Increasing Aeronautic Electric Propulsion Performances by Cogeneration and Heat Recovery

Dumas, Antonio / Vucinic, Dean / Trancossi, Michele / Stewart, Paul

Emissions from aviation have become a focus of increasing interest in recent years. The growth of civil aviation is faster than nearly all other economic sectors. Increased demand has led to a higher growth rate in fossil fuels consumption by the aviation sector. Despite more fuel-efficient and less polluting turbofan and turboprop engines, the growth of air travel contributes to increase pollution attributable to aviation. Aircraft are currently the only human-made in situ generators of emissions in the upper troposphere and in the stratosphere. The depletion of the stratosphere's ozone layer by CFCs and related chemicals has underscored the importance of anticipating other potential insults to the ozone layer. Different possible solutions have been advanced to reduce the environmental impact of aviation, such as electrification of ground operations, optimization of airline timetables and airspace usage, limitation of cruise altitude and increased use of turboprop aircrafts. Those improvements seem very limited answers, which allow only marginal reduction of the environmental footprint of air transport. Breakthrough concepts such as the all-electric aircrafts must be considered. Today state of electric-propulsion is demonstrating a lack of performance and operative range if compared to traditional propulsion concepts. This paper presents a novel concept which has been only envisaged before based on the increase of the performance and range of electric airplanes by an effective cogeneration on board. This concept aims to allow effective and more efficient electric aeronautic propulsion through next generation of green all electric propulsion.