The civil aviation sector plays an increasingly significant role in transportation sustainability in the environmental, economic, and social dimensions. Driven by the concerns of sustainability in the aviation sector, more electrified aircraft propulsion technologies have emerged and form a very promising approach to future sustainable and decarbonized aviation. This review paper aims to provide a comprehensive and broad-scope survey of the recent progress and development trends in sustainable aviation electrification. Firstly, the architectures of electrified aircraft propulsion are presented with a detailed analysis of the benefits, challenges, and studies/applications to date. Then, the challenges and technical barriers of electrified aircraft propulsion control system design are discussed, followed by a summary of the control methods frequently used in aircraft propulsion systems. Next, the mainstream energy management strategies are investigated and further utilized to minimize the block fuel burn, emissions, and economic cost. Finally, an overview of the development trends of aviation electrification is provided.

Hybrid electric propulsion systems have been identified as feasible solutions for regional jets and narrow-body aircraft to reduce block fuel burn, emissions, and operating costs. In this article, a nonlinear model predictive control-based optimal energy management scheme (MPC-EMS) has been proposed to minimize the block fuel burn during flight. First, the artificial neural network (ANN) model is adopted to predict turbofan engine performance; meanwhile, gas turbine–electrical powertrain integration is investigated and analyzed for typical operating conditions. Then, by combining a point-mass aircraft dynamic model, nonlinear MPC with the cross-entropy method (CEM) is proposed to obtain optimal energy management based on a fully coupled aerodynamics-propulsion hybrid electric aircraft model. Besides, this state-constrained optimal control problem is reformulated as a state-unconstrained problem with a penalty function to reduce the computational load. Finally, the proposed MPC-EMS algorithm is applied to Boeing 737-800 aircraft with mechanically parallel hybrid electric propulsion configuration to minimize the block fuel burn and compared with the optimization results using global genetic algorithm (GA)-based EMS and equivalent consumption minimization strategy (ECMS). The simulation results indicate that the proposed MPC-EMS can effectively reduce the computational time compared with global GA-based EMS while achieving global optimization performance with only a minor difference of 1.71% of block fuel burn and emissions reductions.