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arXiv · 2606.15845

An Optimal Power Management Policy for Hydrogen-based Hybrid Aero Engines

Faezeh Pak·Uto Perra·Frank Willems·Theo Hofman·Mauro Salazar
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Abstract

This paper presents a power management policy for a hydrogen-based hybrid aero engine combining a gas turbine and a solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC). Specifically, we first identify a quadratic quasi-steady-state model of the propulsion system and formulate the minimum-fuel optimal control problem as a function of the power split between gas turbine and SOFC that captures the interconnections between the components and accounts for their operational limits. Second, leveraging the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker optimality conditions and partial convexity and monotonicity model properties, we compute the globally optimal steady-state power split for the different phases of the flight in closed form. Finally, we verify this power management policy with a high-fidelity integrated static model %simulator across different flight phases, revealing in less than 1.5 % normalized root mean square error in power allocation and less than 0.7 % in predicted fuel consumption. Our results show that the optimal power management policy can be translated into a heuristic control law requesting the highest SOFC power that does not exceed its maximum operating temperature, ultimately paving the way for minimal-effort on-board implementations.

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Faezeh Pak, Uto Perra, Frank Willems, Theo Hofman, Mauro Salazar. 2026-06-14. An Optimal Power Management Policy for Hydrogen-based Hybrid Aero Engines. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.15845

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