Hybrid Electric Propulsion System for a VTOL/Multirotor Aircraft

LaunchPoint Technologies proposes to build a scalable hybrid electric propulsion system. LaunchPoint will build and fly a 1 kW hybrid electric vehicle and will build and bench test a 6 kW hybrid power source to demonstrate scalability to much larger systems. During the phase I, LaunchPoint showed the feasibility of a manned hybrid electric VTOL vehicle that can achieve the speed and fuel efficiency of a high aspect fixed wing aircraft while still providing VTOL capability for a commuter-type application. Using Fly-By- Wire techniques and applying it to electric aircraft propulsion can lead to highly reliable architectures which we call "Propulsion-By-Wire", providing a tremendous increase in reliability and safety of the vehicle compared to conventional VTOL architectures. In this phase II we propose to develop the hybrid power source (Battery, BMS, Gen-set, and hybrid controller) portion of a "Propulsion-By-Wire" system for 2 power levels. LaunchPoint will build and fly a 1 kW hybrid electric vehicle that will meet notional airworthiness requirements for flight over people, and will scale the hybrid power source to 6kW proving the potential scalability of the system.