Anagrafe della ricerca

DIGACE project aims to provide a digital approach towards the certification of innovative hybrid-electric aircraft configurations belonging to the part CS23 for normal category airplane. With the rapid advent of novel configurations and technologies, regulation authorities took quickly remedial publishing several amendment and special condition, to fill the gap and overcome certification shortcomings, replacing rigid design requirements with performance-based airworthiness standards. The CS23 modifications led to, over the accepted Means of Compliance (MoC) from prescriptive advisory circulars, several consensus standards accepted from aviation community. Besides the fact to handle many scattered documents each other cross-linked, these requirements are often not well interpreted or absolutely neglected in the design stage of innovative configurations, resulting in misleading and uncertifiable architectures. Making a bridge between design methodologies of innovative hybrid-electric aircraft and regulation requirements, DIGACE project will contribute to the skeleton of certification process driving the design towards the product. The state-of-the-art Model-Based-System-Engineering (MBSE) approach will be employed to digitalize and model the document-based approach of the regulations, reducing integration issues. From a document-centric paper-based, DIGACE project will collect the dataset produced in the certification process into a digital model regulation and MoC form, allowing the automatic checklist and data reporting for any specific requirements. Focusing on some of regulation subparts, requirements and MoC will be digitally traced using a Systems Modeling Language (SysML), highlighting the needed test cases suitable as means of compliance. At design stage, simulation tools will be used as test cases to analyze the aircraft configuration according to the regulation requirements. Available methods, such as Overall Aircraft Design, Performance & Mission simulation, Hybrid-Electric Powerplant sizing, and On-Board-System will be reviewed according to regulation requirements, to be digitally used as MoC. The designed configurations will be regulation compliant, and automatic certification reporting will be enabled for the CS23 subparts under investigation (Subpart B Flight, Subpart C Structure, Subpart E Powerplant installation and Subpart F Systems and equipment). The proposed research will reduce the development time and cost of future aeronautical products avoiding the development of uncertifiable design and the time needed to provide the necessary documentation to the certification authorities. Abovementioned methodologies will be applied to two application cases, a six-engine high-lift-propeller distributed propulsion aircraft, with a hybrid-electric powertrain or with full-electric powertrain, demonstrating the process flexibility. Assuming different regulation requirements or MoC, the resilience of proposed approach will be proved.