Introducing an efficiency index to evaluate eVTOL designs

The evolution of electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft as part of the Advanced Air Mobility initiative will affect our society and the environment in fundamental ways. Technological forecasting suggests that commercial services are fast emerging to transform urban and regional air mobility for people and cargo. However, the complexities of diverse design choices pose a challenge for potential adopters or service providers because there are no objective and simple means to compare designs based on the available set of performance specifications. This analysis defines an aeronautically informed propulsion efficiency index (PEX) to compare the performance of eVTOL designs. Range, payload ratio, and aspect ratio are the minimum set of independent parameters needed to compute a PEX that can distinguish among eVTOL designs. The distribution of the PEX and the range are lognormal in the design space. There is no association between PEX values and the mainstream eVTOL architecture types or the aircraft weight class. A multilinear regression showed that the three independent parameters explained >90 % of the PEX distribution in the present design space.