Optimal Arrangement of Electric Motors for Distributed Electric Propulsion Aircraft Using Generalized Benders Decomposition

The effective operation of distributed electric propulsion (DEP) aircraft depends upon the proper arrangement of electric propulsion motors. To address this issue, this paper presents an optimal arrangement method, which is intended to be used for the preliminary determination of the number and size of electric propulsion motors in DEP aircraft. The key feature of this method is that, by incorporating the DEP control scheme into the arrangement process, it yields the optimal number and size of electric propulsion motors in a dynamic context. Specifically, the DEP control problem is embedded into the arrangement problem, thus forming an integrated optimization problem. By using the generalized Benders decomposition, this integrated problem is solved efficiently. The simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.