Optimisation of Floating Offshore Wind Substructures: A Higher-Fidelity Approach

Floating offshore wind turbines (FOWTs) unlock the potential to harness energy from wind in deeper waters. Despite their potential, the major obstacle to large-scale commercial deployment remains the floating substructure's high cost. Multidisciplinary design, analysis and optimisation techniques are commonly employed to improve their cost...

Assessment of Conceptual Hybrid-Electric Regional Aircraft with Boundary-Layer Ingestion Propeller

Boundary Layer Ingestion (BLI) is a promising propulsion concept for aviation, aiming to reduce fuel burn. This configuration involves using the propulsor to ingest the boundary layer from the fuselage or wing. Typically, aircraft with BLI propulsors also integrate a hybrid-electric powertrain. This integrated setup has shown potential in fuel...

Aircraft Integration of Air-Based Thermal Management Systems for Propulsive Fuel Cell Systems

Hydrogen is seen as a potential energy carrier for the next generation of aircraft that will be more climate-friendly than the previous generation of kerosene-powered aircraft. Two types of hydrogen-based propulsion systems are currently foreseen for such aircraft: hydrogen combustion and hydrogen fuel cell. In addition to producing useful...

Optimal Control And Energy Management For Hybrid Aircraft

Interest grows rapidly in electric and hybrid electric aircraft. To determine the optimal performance and energy management required with such novel powertrain configurations, a knowledge-based aircraft and powertrain performance model is developed. The model is then used to set up an optimal control problem, which is transcribed to a non-linear...

Offshore Wind Farm Layout Optimisation: To provide insight in what can be expected from offshore wind farm layout optimisation

The potential gain in energy production and profit by improving the placements of turbines within a wind farm is driving interest. However, finding the optimal placements provides a complex problem. A large number of inter-dependent design variables create a design space that is difficult to solve. Therefore there is much attention for offshore...

Aerodynamic Design and Analysis of a Two Stage to Orbit Winged semi-Reusable Launching Vehicle

The commercialization of the space industry has led to a reduction in size and weight of satellites and launching vehicles, which have effectively reduced the cost of space services. The costs of launching payloads to space can be significantly reduced when the launching vehicles are reusable. The two-stage-to-orbit system with a winged,...

Fuel Tank Integration for Hydrogen Airliners

Zero-carbon-dioxide-emitting hydrogen-powered aircraft have, in recent decades, come back on the stage as promising protagonists in the fight against global warming. Nevertheless, most recent studies agree that hydrogen aircraft would underperform their kerosene counterparts in terms of operative empty mass and specific energy consumption. The...

Model-Based Reliability Engineering: A methodology to enhance reliability analysis in student-based CubeSat design projects

This thesis work proposes an approach to integrate design and reliability assessment, based on a single modeling environment by deployment of Systems Modeling Language (SysML). The main purpose of the developed approach is to help enhance reliability assessment in student-based CubeSat projects. Considering the limited project resources, that...

Methodological Support for Knowledge Based Engineering Application Development: Improving Traceability of Knowledge into Application Code

Knowledge Based Engineering (KBE) applications mainly reduce the lead-time in engineering design projects by translating product and process knowledge into application code. The problem with KBE applications is that they produce an output from some input, but it is unclear how it came to its conclusions. There are existing KBE methodologies such...

A methodology for design, analysis and optimization of a vertical take-off system for rigid-wing airborne wind energy systems

Airborne wind energy (AWE) is a new technology aiming at converting wind energy by flying crosswind patterns with a tethered aircraft. One of the main challenges of this technology is the launching and retrieving of the aircraft. A promising solution is the use of a vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) system in the form of multiple electrically...

An Integrated Planning Approach: Maintenance Task Scheduling Optimization

Aircraft base maintenance consists of hundreds of tasks including preventive, corrective and modification tasks which have to be scheduled to a few check moments per year. The allocation of tasks to checks represents a complex scheduling problem due to the constraints involved. A mixed integer linear programming model was developed to optimize...