Today governments and aerospace industries keep into high considerations aeronautical transportation environmental impacts (pollution, noise and climate change). Also users (both civil and military users) keep into high consideration aircraft performances such as fuel consumption, mission flexibility, safety and reliability.
One of the aspects on which governments and industries are focusing efforts in order to reduce environmental impacts and improve mission performances is the on board energy management: the energy management encompasses all aspects of on-board energy provision, storage, distribution and consumption.
Working on this topic Hybrid Energy Management project aims to arrange, evaluate, analyze and develop hybrid propulsive architectures for UAV and General Aviation able to optimize performances about the management of aircraft energy. This kind of architectures, leveraging innovative solutions and enabling technologies relevant to electromagnetic and electrical aspects, allow to optimize the control of energy fluxes in order to reach high performances (e.g. reduce fuel consumption, power boost,…) with economic returns.


The project, aimed to investigate architectures able to optimize the on board energy management and to reduce environmental impacts, deals with system aspects (KPI definition, architecture definition) and with enabling technologies required to realize the selected architectures.
Starting from the performance requirements (e.g specific fuel consumption, mission reliability, safety and flexibility) and from the potential architectures definition, the enabling technologies will be developed realizing sub-system technological demonstrators (e.g. high frequency low losses electrical machines, high efficiency energy storage systems…): these sub-system will be integrated in the system technological demonstrator in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the technologies and the architecture selected.


In order to reach this goal, the project involves different partners with extensive experience and know how about aerospace systems, electrical machines, power conversion, systems control, energy storage and reciprocating engines. All these partners are able to develop and manage enabling technologies required to realize innovative architectures aimed to optimize the on board energy management.