Fuel system application
The aircraft fuel system consists of fuel tanks, a pipe network with pumps and ejectors, and auxiliary systems for ventilation and inerting. In each component, a mix of jet fuel and gas can be encountered. The gas can be air or a gas mixture with high nitrogen content.
The transient behavior of a fuel system can be simulated using Fuel System Library. This library provides the component and thermodynamic property models and can be used in particular in detailed design where the exact tank shapes are known (and are supposed to be imported from CAD data), the fluid dynamics or both the gaseous and liquid phases are of interest, and arbitrary motion shall be imposed on the fuel system (based on look-up tables or an integrated flight dynamics simulation). Use this functionality to study interactions between venting and refueling operations, fuel quantity measurement and quantification including sensor/probe design, detailed controller development and other detailed design studies.
Functionality to run fuel system models with additional simplifying modeling assumptions are available in Liquid Cooling Library. Use this functionality to assume strictly incompressible flow, apply idealized tank shapes and neglect the (potential) gas flow through fuel lines (i.e., only prescribe venting pressure). Study refueling timing and consumption scenarios, develop the high-level fuel quantity management logic and investigate high-level thermal management approaches with this functionality. This functionality also offers pure steady-state simulation for very early design.
Models of aircraft flight dynamics to integrate the fuel system simulation with aircraft motion simulation are available in Aircraft Dynamics Library. See the Aircraft Dynamics and Performance application for more details.
Models of electrical drives, for instance for pumps, can be found in Electrification Library. See the Propulsion and Power application for more details.
Lastly, hydrogen fuel storage and distribution, in particular in cryogenic state, is covered by the Hydrogen Powered Aircraft application. See the corresponding section for more details.