The Influence of the Wiring Harness on the System Performance of eVTOL Aircraft on the Example of Common Reference Models

Abstract

This paper deals with the influence of the wiring harness on the system performance of electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft. The architecture and connections of the wiring harness are formalized using graph theory. The adjacency and incidence matrices provided by algebraic graph theory are used to define the harness connections and links. The current flows within the harness are calculated by applying Kirchhoff’s and Ohm's law to the network equations. Three common reference models are used to simulate and optimize different harness architectures. The harness architectures differ in the kind of connection and number of harness links. The optimization is done using two objectives. One objective is to maximize the range of the aircraft. The other objective, to minimize the harness mass, is used to show the performance difference of such a wiring harness. The influence of the system voltage and the take-off mass are examined as well. The results of the optimizations show, that a wiring harness exists for each configuration which maximizes the range of the aircraft. This optimal wiring harness is not the wiring harness with the lowest mass.