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Aircraft engines powering propulsion of the aircraft is the key component of the system. In aircraft industry it is desirable that an aircraft engines should supply high speeds (for military fighters) with low maintenance (for civil airplanes). In this regard an integration of gas turbine engines with traditional propeller has been introduced and termed as turboprop engine. In present work, a gas turbine with cooled blading has been proposed to be the turboprop engine which has been exergoeconomically analyzed to assess the performance and economics related to the proposed turboprop engine. Exergo-economic analysis is a tool which combines thermodynamic analysis and economic principles to provide information that is helpful to predict thermodynamic performance and total cost of the engine (thermal system). The methodology includes energy, exergy and cost balance equations for component-wise modelling of whole system.

Gas turbine technology has traditionally been used by the aviation industry for powering the aircraft including acting as APU. Operational unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has a gas turbine which is used as Auxiliary Power Unit (APU) which generically have overall efficiency not exceeding 35% which limits the range in terms of time in the air for the same APU fuel carried onboard. Gas turbine exhaust heat energy is largely wasted and there is scope of its utilization by thermally coupling it with a solid-oxide fuel cell (SOFC). By coupling SOFC with the gas turbine (GT) based power system, a hybrid SOFC-GT based APU system has been proposed for thermodynamic analysis, and the thermal efficiency of the proposed system can be enhanced by 77%. This paper focuses on a thermodynamic cycle analysis of an internal reformed solid oxide fuel cell which is integrated with the gas turbine to form a hybrid APU system for an UAV.