Supercritical Delivers Advanced Optimization Capabilities for Electra's NASA AACES 2050 Airliner Concept

Supercritical Inc. announced its role in developing advanced multidisciplinary design optimization capabilities for Electra's next-generation turbo-electric airliner concept, created as part of NASA's Advanced Aircraft Concepts for Environmental Sustainability (AACES) 2050 program.

Supercritical, a University of Michigan spin-off specializing in high-fidelity multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO), built key components of the optimization machinery that allowed the Electra-led team to evaluate unconventional aircraft as fully integrated systems using coupled physics-based models.

The work supports Electra's broader view that electrification is not only a propulsion shift, but a way to unlock new aircraft architectures by allowing airframe, propulsion, thermal, and mission design to be optimized together.

The Electra AACES 2050 concept pairs a double-bubble lifting fuselage with hybrid-electric propulsion including boundary-layer-ingesting electric tail fans, a configuration the team found could deliver up to a 17 percent efficiency improvement beyond gains already expected by 2050. Concepts of this kind are challenging to evaluate with conventional conceptual design tools because the airframe, propulsion, and thermal systems are too tightly coupled to be studied in isolation. Supercritical contributed key framework integration capabilities that enabled the broader team to evaluate these tightly coupled systems within a unified optimization framework.

Electra's AACES 2050 turbo-electric airliner concept, featuring a double-bubble lifting fuselage and boundary-layer-ingesting electric tail fans.
Credit: Electra.

A key contribution of the collaboration was the development of an engine-cycle trajectory optimization capability. MIT's Gas Turbine Laboratory led the development of the robust propulsion-cycle modeling needed to evaluate a full engine thermodynamic cycle at every point along the mission, while Supercritical contributed to integrating these capabilities within the broader multidisciplinary optimization framework. This replaces the lookup tables and surrogate models that conceptual studies typically rely on, allowing real propulsion physics to remain directly coupled to the optimization of both the aircraft design and mission trajectory. Achieving this level of integration is a challenging numerical problem that has not previously been demonstrated at this scale within an aircraft design framework.

Beyond the trajectory work, Supercritical brought empennage sizing into the optimization itself, sizing tails for demanding engine-out conditions to maintain aircraft control across conventional, distributed, and hybrid-electric layouts, rather than treating them as fixed inputs. They contributed structural weight modeling for unconventional double-bubble airframes, extended the framework to hybrid-electric propulsion with motor, inverter, battery, and thermal trade-offs, integrating these capabilities natively into NASA's open-source Aviary framework, built on OpenMDAO. Throughout, Supercritical turned research prototypes into reliable, analytically differentiated, framework-ready capabilities a design team can trust across thousands of optimizations.

The capabilities developed through the collaboration are being contributed back to the community. Much of the work extends NASA's open-source Aviary framework and is planned for public release, giving researchers, students, and industry teams the same tools to evaluate advanced aircraft concepts with greater rigor and reproducibility.