In recent years, NASA has been actively pushing for electric aircraft to reduce fuel burn, carbon emissions and noise. However, the current battery technology prevents fully battery-driven aircraft from becoming a reality in the near future. As a stepping- stone towards this initiative, hybrid-electric and turbo-electric aircraft are being researched to understand the impact of electrified propulsion on the performance of the aircraft, such as the Boeing Super Ultra (SUGAR) Volt, NASA Single-aisle Turbo-electric Commercial Transport with Fuselage Boundary Layer Ingestion (STARC-ABL), and Airbus E-Thrust concepts. A single-engine turbo-electric concept for a single-aisle aircraft was studied and the performance was evaluated. The results of this analysis indicated that this concept provides a significant fuel burn reduction, but at the cost of having a redundant system to provide power during engine-out situations. The objective of this research is to study and compare redundant power sources for a single-aisle turbo-electric aircraft to satisfy the single engine out constraint. The alternatives considered are - pure turbo-electric two-turboshaft engine architecture and a hybrid-turbo-electric single-turboshaft engine architecture with a battery pack for redundant power. This study is also aimed at evaluating different ways to size and use the battery that would provide the most fuel burn benefit. A performance analysis of these different architectures was performed and the results are presented in this paper.
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