Enhanced electric power transfer control for thrust management and fuel efficiency improvement of supersonic aero-propulsion

Maintaining stable thrust management while simultaneously improving fuel efficiency remains a key challenge for civil supersonic propulsion. However, existing more-electric engine control strategies fail to maintain constant thrust while preserving fuel efficiency gains. In this paper, an enhanced electric power transfer (eEPT) control is proposed to suppress the post-activation thrust offset and activation-induced thrust fluctuations of baseline battery-free electric power transfer (EPT) within the examined cruise conditions, while retaining its fuel consumption benefit. eEPT control schedules coordinate eEPT power and corrected low-pressure shaft speed with flight Mach and altitude for constant thrust and specific fuel consumption (SFC) minimization based on the aircraft-level thrust requirement, which are embedded into the established industrial sensor-based eEPT controller, potentially facilitating future implementation. Numerical comparisons of eEPT and baseline EPT were conducted using a physics-based supersonic engine model, whose steady predictions closely matched the reference model data, although coupled transient dynamics require further validation. Results show that eEPT maintains consistent post-activation steady thrust and noticeably suppresses transient thrust fluctuation during activation, thereby mitigating the noticeable thrust deviations observed in the baseline EPT case. Moreover, the proposed eEPT control retains fuel-consumption benefits comparable to those of baseline EPT, yielding SFC reductions of 1.111% and 0.888% under the prescribed subsonic and supersonic cruise conditions with future prospective electrical-system efficiency, respectively. The results numerically demonstrate the potential of eEPT to improve thrust management while preserving fuel efficiency benefit under preliminary aero-thermal analysis, while experimental and hardware-level validation considering more detailed electrical-system, aircraft-level, and off-nominal effects is still required.