The "more electric aircraft" team is investigating new concepts of onboard energy supply systems for future airplanes. For the next generation aircraft, electric energy will be of growing importance since compared to hydraulic or pneumatical supply systems, it is often favourable with regard to performance, weight, integration and maintenance. Challenges are the design of suitable aircraft system architectures and questions of electric stability and quality of the resulting complex electric supply systems.

Our core competence is to analyse, design and optimise power generation and distribution architectures and systems by use of modern multi-physics models expressed in the object oriented modelling language Modelica and optimisation tools like MOPS.

The research is conducted in several EC funded projects like POA (Power Optimised Aircraft), MOET (More Open Electrical Technologies) and CleanSky,  working together with European airframers and suppliers.

Martin Kuhn German Aerospace Center Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics System Dynamics and Control Münchner Straße 20 82234 Oberpfaffenhofen-Wessling Phone:+49 8153 28-2479 Fax:+49 8153 28-1441 Mail:Martin Kuhn Internet:http://www.dlr.de/rm

Christian Schallert German Aerospace Center Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics System Dynamics and Control Münchner Straße 20 82234 Oberpfaffenhofen-Wessling Phone:+49 8153 28-2408 Fax:+49 8153 28-1441 Mail:Christian Schallert Internet:http://www.dlr.de/rm

The Power Optimised Aircraft Project The Power Optimised Aircraft (POA) project is a technology platform within the European Community (EC) 5th Framework Programme. It is a four-year project with a budget of about 100 million Euros, jointly funded by the EC and the consortium, which is being coordinated by Liebherr-Aerospace. The aim of POA is to identify, optimise and validate innovative aircraft equipment which contributes to the reduction in consumption of non-propulsive power. Full article

The Virtual Iron Bird model library The VIB model library is designed as an object-oriented Modelica library consisting of several levels. The hierarchy of the library can be summarised as follows: Physical interface definitions are the basic modules for generic physical models on the level “Physical Domains” such as electrics, mechanics, hydraulics and pneumatics. Aircraft components – and in the next step aircraft systems – are implemented using basic physical models and component models respectively so that each level is based on the underlying levels of the entire library. Full article