Niek van Amstel

After his bachelor in Aerospace Engineering at the TU Delft, Niek pursued his academic career with a master's in Air Transport Operations. Having spent 6 months in the Dutch Caribbean for an internship, he then committed to a master's thesis project with NACO on electric aviation.

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Presentation

Optimizing the energy and charging infrastructure costs for electric aircraft

This research implements flexibility into a flight schedule to lower the charging peak power demand of electric aircraft. Additionally, it incorporates the energy provision in terms of renewable energy sources in combination with battery storage. Besides a daily operational model, an entire year has also been subject to an energy balance-focused optimization for a case study on Bonaire. Costs were found to be significantly lower than for a fixed-flight schedule for an operational day while the yearly model identified the minimum optimized required energy infrastructure. Sensitivity analysis also showed possible airport energy business cases.