Open michaelweinold opened 4 months ago
As it is still a little unclear how we will get the aircraft size from values reported in literature, I have split out the following into two steps (aircraft sizing for design mission, fuel requirement calculation for off-design mission), with a few options for step 1:
1.a) for design mission (simplest)
1.b) for design mission (current method)
1.c) for design mission (similar to GAM)
2.) for off-design mission(s)
The energy calculation for 1c) and scaling for 2) could be based on some combination of:
In the process of setting vehicle parameters, the
carculator
attempts to design optimally sized cars from scratch. \ It does so using an iterative approach:The iterative approach is required because (highly simplified) vehicle parameters are interdependent:
weight(power)
andpower(weight)
For each vehicle size class, it assumes a starting value for weight/power is provided. The interdependent vehicle parameters are then solved for iteratively.
In contrast, "sizing" aircraft from scratch is unlikely to be a viable approach. Sizing aircraft is a complex undertaking that needs to account for many business parameters that we could not hope to capture. For instance, while an Airbus A380 in all-economy seating configuration would have excellent fuel efficiency/pax, industry now considers the very concept a failure.
It would therefore be prudent to use aircraft parameters from existing proposals (such as the MIT D8 Concept), where all these considerations have already been considered.
@julienmctighe found similar approaches in literature (email from 19.01.2024):
It therefore seems that we need to have not a "sizing" function, but a "weight
and balance" calculation function. This function would compute the fuel required per trip: