Systematic Architecture Generation for the Design of Aircraft Propulsive Systems

Abstract Sustainability objectives in the aeronautical industry push companies towards novel aircraft propulsive systems (e.g., hybrid electric or hydrogen-based). Coupled with reliability constraints for certification, this creates a potentially highly complex propulsive architecture design. Thus, tools and methods are needed to explore efficiently this growing system design space. Several critical features have been identified by system architects in one of the leading companies in this domain: consideration of parallel functional chains for safety and redundancy reasons, systematic exploration of the design space, and the possibility to systematically generate from functional domain onto the physical domain of the system architecture. The paper proposed a DSM-based system architecture generation and design methodology with the objective to consider both parallel and branching system architectures, while supporting this systematic generation from functional to physical domain. The methodology was compared with previous case studies. Moreover, it has been tested and validated in the industrial setting. Both the generation process and the constraints were tested for the design of aircraft propulsive systems. The aim of this research is to propose a first step allowing for systematic exploration of system architectures that can be further integrated into existing simulation workflows enabling the performance of propulsion architectures to be estimated systematically and more quickly than with manual analyses.