\label{cha:intro} Electric flight propulsion is a highly anticipated but challenging field. Electric propulsion could be a sustainable solution to reduce the impact of aviation on the environment. However, long flight durations and the current limiting energy storage capacities are often an obstacle for the application of these technologies to power aircraft. Only certain target areas are possible nowadays.
An example of such a target area might be air racing, since these flights are of short duration. Growing in popularity and technical complexity, air racing is an exciting sport, both today and in the future. The design of an aerobatic racing aircraft has to be altered and adapted for the challenges of an all electric aircraft, to achieve a competitive and sustainable product. In this project, the conceptual and preliminary design of such an aircraft is performed. The project objective statement is stated as follows:
Make aerobatic racing innovative and eco-friendly for the future.
Following from this, the mission need statement is defined as follows:
To design an electric propelled aerobatic racing aircraft with a group of 10 Aerospace Engineering students of the TU Delft and have its first flight in 2025 costing no more than 300,000 Euro, in order to test and show the feasibility of electrically propelled, high performance, sustainable aircraft.
The main focus of the Mid-term Report is explaining the process of finding the different concepts, possible for our mission profile. It explains how each concept and subsystem was traded off to find the most suitable concepts. Each step and the tools used to help us during this process is explained in the report. This is a crucial step for the project since it determines which concepts are feasible and are further investigated in more detail to find the final concept.
The Mid-term Report first gives an overview of the work distribution of the project and a schedule in the second chapter. This is followed by the project strategy and a market analysis. The fifth chapter explains the risk that can be encountered during the project and the design process. After conducting the risk assessment a Class I weight estimation is conducted in chapter seven. After this the design option trees are created which are a helpful tool during the design process. Chapter eight includes the design trade-off of the initial concepts, after this process the subsystems were traded off in chapter nine. A complete detailed analysis was then conducted, from which a final trade-off is done in chapter 11. Since the concepts are known an internal and external configuration layout was performed. A sensitivity analysis is undertaken in chapter 13 to investigate the performance of the selected design with changes in the main parameter. Chapter 14 describes the performances and maneuvers the aircraft has to have and perform and which mission profile it has. After determining the needed performances the required aerodynamic properties and stability and control characteristics are determined in chapter 15 and chapter 16. During the design process several tool are used to ease the process and to perform mathematical operations. These tools are verified and validated in chapter 17. Chapter 18 then includes the reliability, availability and maintainability and safety characteristics. An interface definition and a \(N^2\) chart is given in the following chapter, which is then followed in the next chapter by the operation and logistics concept.The last two chapters include the communication flow diagram and the sustainable development approach.