ECO-150

A 150 Passenger Environmentally Conscious Regional Airliner

During ESAero's research on hybrid propulsion systems, the team became convinced that conventional, non-superconducting, systems could be made to work in a large aircraft. With funding from NASA Ames, ESAero was tasked with taking the ECO-150 concept and incorporating available ambient-temperature generator and motor technology to meet NASA’s 2020-25 timeframe N+2 goals which included 40% less fuel used, lower emissions, and lower noise.
 

Stemming back to 2008, ECO-150 was derived to improve future 737-class transportation through use of embedded, turbo-electric distributed propulsion. Electrification of propulsion has been identified to yield aerodynamic, structural, and integration advantages over standard configurations.

Turbo-electric Distributed Propulsion (TeDP)

ESAero has studied the application of TeDP in several forms to a wide variety of manned and unmanned air vehicles since its inception in 2003 with several approaches to distributed propulsion. In the studies, it developed a distributed propulsion system architecture and used it to estimate vehicle performance including details on the propulsion components, battery sizing and augmentation, and system performance using in-house design tools. It also identified tools that could be developed during future work.