Conceptual Design of Fixed Wing Electrical VTOL Air Transport Vehicle

Abstract

There is considerable amount of different conceptual eVTOL designs to meet future urban air transportation needs. Aircraft concept design choices are highly critical for meeting the requirements at the start and intelligent choices must be worked out in the early design phase in order not to struggle with too many impractical configurations. In this work, 3 types of most promising alternative eVTOL concepts are evaluated. These configurations are: the multirotor, vectored thrust and “lift + cruise” concepts. Although hoverbikes and electric helicopters could be categorized as eVTOL, they are not suitable to meet most of the requirements, and they are excluded from consideration. Multirotor aircraft are fairly simple to build but they are not easily able to meet the requirement of say, a 100 km range, thus eliminated from consideration. On the other hand, although vectored thrust vehicles can reach high speeds and efficiencies, they are considerably complex to design and build. Finally, the present “lift + cruise configuration” has been selected for the design as it is considered the best compromise between range, hover efficiency and reliability. Although this solution has some disadvantage such as unused propellers producing high drag during cruise, overall design characteristics represents a very viable solution.