MIMOSA

PURPOSE

MIMOSA paves the way to zero-carbon regional aviation by tightly coupling a real-time fuel-cell and thermal-management simulation with PACE’s preliminary aircraft design platform Desmo.

A single digital thread runs from the smallest cell to the complete airframe, enabling engineers to capture stack-cooling-airframe interactions, run bottom-up sensitivity studies and top-down system optimisations within one coherent workflow.

Hybrid-electric and conventional regional-aircraft reference models supply an instant performance baseline, turning abstract sustainability targets into verifiable numbers for range, payload and energy use.

PURPOSE

MIMOSA paves the way to zero-carbon regional aviation by tightly coupling a real-time fuel-cell and thermal-management simulation with PACE’s preliminary aircraft design platform Desmo.

PROJECT AT A GLANCE

Funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy, the focus of MIMOSA is linking the preliminary aircraft design platform Desmo with a detailed fuel-cell and thermal-management simulation tool to perform a multi-scale simulation.

Tailored interfaces are being developed to enable continuous exchange of airframe and propulsion data; power demand, heat flows and operating strategies need to be synchronized, so every component change has an impact on aircraft level. In parallel, an investigation is conducted into whether AI techniques can support this coupling: Methods are created that may shorten computation time or improve prediction accuracy.

The resulting integrated environment provides the basis for the subsequent systematic evaluation of different system configurations and helps identify optimal designs faster. Achievable improvements are then quantified through in-depth analyses.

PROJECT AT A GLANCE

MIMOSA explores how to marry detailed fuel-cell and thermal-management simulation tools (e.g. AVL CRUISE™ M) with the preliminary aircraft design platform Desmo, thereby leveraging synergy potentials in system and overall aircraft design that can enhance the performance, efficiency, and environmental sustainability of hybrid-electric aircraft and their simulation. Custom interfaces are being built between the simulation tools to exchange power, heat and mass-flow data at the resolution needed for true multiscale analysis.

Additionally, MIMOSA investigates the possibility of simulating different system architectures in the same study to vary stack pressure, cooler drag, hydrogen storage layout and make their combined influence on range, payload and energy demand visible. By closing the loop from component to aircraft level, the design space is narrowed early, and costly dead-end configurations are filtered out before detailed work starts.

PACE ROLE

Within Desmo, alternative fuel-cell system architectures are modeled and their influence on mass, aerodynamics, and mission performance is tracked.

PACE will investigate the function of system architecture swaps and benchmarking, as well as machine learning applications to support hybrid-electric regional aircraft design, aiming to streamline the development process.

Insights from a first loose coupling loop between Desmo and a detailed fuel-cell and thermal-management simulation tool will then feed into the interface specification and implementation that are needed for a multiscale simulation workflow.

In the picture: front row, from left to right: Prof. Dr.-Ing. Andreas Bardenhagen (Professor, TUB), Fatemeh Nasri (Product Manager, PACE), Michael Shamiyeh (Overall Aircraft Design Engineer, Deutsche Aircraft), Lukas Eisenberger (Chemical Engineer, AVL) & back row, from left to right: Vladislav Todorov (Research Associate, TUB), Andreas Gobbin (Research Associate, TUB), Christoph Junkereit (Consultant, PACE), Enrico Stauss (Consultant, PACE), Dr.-Ing. Sascha Seidl (Project Manager, AVL) & Jonathan Berberich (Project Sponsor, DLR).