Under the emerging urban air mobility (UAM) concept, electric vertical take-off
and landing (eVTOL) aircraft were designed to alleviate urban traffic congestion
due to their advantages of low take-off and landing site requirements, less
pollution, low noise, and strong stability. However, due to the high-level power
consumption of eVTOL and only having air flight mode, this kind of aircraft has
a severe shortage of cruising range. To improve the endurance and dynamic
performance, the flying car designed in this paper added a ground driving mode
based on eVTOL and used distributed ducted fans to provide lift. And the
influence of different power transmission routes on the dynamic and economic
performance of the flying car was analyzed. On this basis, the overall take-off
weight of the flying car was estimated through an iterative algorithm, and
parameter design and power system matching for each part of the components were
conducted. Finally, this paper used MATLAB/Simulink to build a flying car power
system model and verified the performance of the flying car through simulation.
The results show that the ducted fan is superior to the isolated fan in
providing both lift and noise control. The maximum flying speed of the flying
car that adopts the power transmission route of four in-wheel motors and
four-rotor motors is 5.1% higher than that of four wheel-side motors combined
with mechanical transmission structures. In pure ground driving conditions, the
flying car can continue to travel 627.6 km at 100 km/h. In pure air flight
conditions, the flying car can continue to fly 88.37 km at 100 km/h. In hybrid
conditions, the flying car can continue to travel 418.4 km on the ground at 100
km/h after taking off to avoid traffic obstacles five times, each time the
distance is 2 km.