Time and Energy Saving Potential of Efficient Urban Air Mobility Airspace Structures

View Video Presentation: https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2022-3545.vid Novel electric propulsion technology has given rise to thinking about Urban Air Mobility in a new way with its expected high degree of operational flexibility. The designs of eVTOL configurations are determined by their mission profile, which we found to be over-simplified at many points in the current scientific literature. There is a gap of understanding which impact the mission profile has on travel time and energy demand. In this paper we review various mission designs, formulate a 5-segment flight profile (including vertical descent, climb, cruise, descent and vertical approach) and apply it on a fleet level of up to 200,000 UAM trips. The demand data originates from the upper Bavaria region study OBUAM. In a sensitivity study we vary cruise altitude, height of the vertical flight segments and the climb & descent angles for two vehicle configurations: a fixed-wing tilt-rotor concept and a multicopter concept. The main findings for the fixed-wing concept are that the height of the vertical flight segments and the cruise altitude should be as low as possible and small climb angles (below 7 degrees) should be avoided. The multicopter concept, however, is penalized by fast forward flight while being comparatively insensitive to both cruise altitude and height of the vertical segments. Further, we found a trade-off between time- and energy-optimal flight with the a energy-optimized climb/descent angle around 10 degree.