ELECTRIC AND HYBRID-ELECTRIC AIRCRAFT: Electric Propulsion, Energy Storage, Power Electronics, Aircraft Architecture, and Sustainable Aviation (Modern Aerospace Engineering Series) (en Inglés)
Reseña del libro "ELECTRIC AND HYBRID-ELECTRIC AIRCRAFT: Electric Propulsion, Energy Storage, Power Electronics, Aircraft Architecture, and Sustainable Aviation (Modern Aerospace Engineering Series) (en Inglés)"
Aviation stands at a technological inflection point comparable to the transition from piston engines to jet propulsion in the mid-twentieth century. Electric and hybrid-electric propulsion, once confined to conceptual studies and small experimental airframes, are now the subject of serious investment by airframers, regulators, and airlines. This textbook was written to give students, practicing engineers, and researchers a single, structured reference that spans the full breadth of the subject: the electric machines and power electronics that move electrons into thrust, the batteries and fuel cells that store the energy, the airframe architectures that make use of electrification, and the certification, economic, and environmental questions that determine whether these aircraft will actually enter widespread service. The book is organized to be read either cover to cover as a semester-length course, or consulted chapter by chapter as a reference. Part I lays the historical and conceptual foundation. Part II builds the core technology base — electric machines, power electronics, batteries, fuel cells, electrical distribution, and thermal management — treating each as a discipline in its own right while continually relating it back to the aircraft-level consequences of mass, volume, and reliability. Part III addresses how these technologies come together at the vehicle level: propulsion architectures, distributed electric propulsion and its aerodynamic coupling, conceptual sizing methods, and structural and weight considerations. Part IV steps back to the wider system: safety and certification, a survey of real programs and what can be learned from them, ground infrastructure, environmental impact, and the economics and outlook for the sector. A deliberate choice has been made throughout to be candid about the limits of current technology. Battery specific energy remains roughly an order of magnitude below that of jet fuel on a usable-energy basis, and this single fact shapes almost every design decision described in this book — from the bias toward short-range, small-aircraft applications, to the popularity of hybrid and turboelectric architectures that mitigate rather than eliminate the energy-storage gap, to the emphasis on distributed propulsion and aerodynamic integration as a way of extracting efficiency gains that do not depend on breakthroughs in cell chemistry. Where the state of the art is genuinely uncertain — for example, the pace of solid-state battery maturation, or which regional-aircraft programs will reach certification — the text says so rather than presenting speculation as settled fact. Numerical values quoted for specific programs (masses, powers, ranges, dates) are drawn from publicly available manufacturer and regulator sources current at the time of writing and are intended to illustrate orders of magnitude and design trends rather than to serve as authoritative specifications; the electric-aviation landscape changes quickly, and readers pursuing current figures for a specific program should consult that manufacturer's or regulator's own published data. Many of the quantitative design relationships in Chapters 12 and 13 are presented as first-order, conceptual-design-level methods appropriate for early trade studies; they are not a substitute for the detailed, certified analysis required in an actual type-certification program. I am grateful to the broader community of electric-aviation researchers, from the university laboratories that built the first electric motorgliders to the NASA, EASA, and FAA teams whose public technical reports and lessons-learned documents have done a great service to the field by being unusually candid about what has and has not worked. This book leans heavily on that shared, published body of work, and any errors of interpretation are my own.
