Future Pathways for EVTOLs: A Design Optimization Perspective

Abstract: The rapid development of advanced urban air mobility, particularly electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft, requires interdisciplinary approaches involving the future urban air mobility ecosystem. Operational cost efficiency, regulatory aspects, sustainability, and environmental compatibility must be incorporated directly into the preliminary design of aircraft and across operational and regulatory strategies. In this work, we present a novel multidisciplinary design optimization framework for the preliminary design of eVTOL aircraft. The framework optimizes conventional design elements of eVTOL aircraft over a generic mission and integrates a comprehensive operational cost model to directly capture economic incentives of the designed system through profit modeling for operators. We compare the optimized eVTOL system with various competing road, rail, and air transportation modes in terms of sustainability, cost, and travel time. We investigate four objective-specific eVTOL optimization designs in a broad scenario space, mapping regulatory, technical, and operational constraints to generate a representation of potential urban air mobility ecosystem conditions. The analysis of an optimized profit-maximizing eVTOL, cost-minimizing eVTOL, sustainability-maximizing eVTOL, and a combined figure of merit maximizing eVTOL design highlights significant trade-offs in the area of profitability, operational flexibility, and sustainability strategies. This underlines the importance of incorporating multiple operationally tangential disciplines into the design process.