Exergy analysis of aircraft environmental control system

Abstract

Traditionally the development of the aircraft, its systems and the associated components revolve around weight optimization and the related design issues. The aircraft environmental control system (ECS) being the maximum consumer of the secondary power developed by the engine, has to be optimized from the energy consumption point of view using the first law of thermodynamics. The application of exergy analysis in aircraft development and its use in optimization of the systems was studied by authors in the past. Adoption of these techniques was predominantly for the aircraft propulsion system and not so extensively for other aircraft systems. Simple ECS system configurations were studied by some authors in this direction. In this paper, configuration studies involving the complexities from the practical applications are studied with an aim to have system with minimum weight and minimum entropy generation