Aiming to demonstrate the technical, environmental and economic feasibility of a box-wing aircraft configuration known as “PrandtlPlane” (or PrP), the PARSIFAL project has been focused on the needs of the short-to-medium routes air traffic (<4000 km), for which today most of the aircraft in service today belongs to category "C" of the ICAO reference code of airports (wingspan within 36 meters). Since this category of aircraft is expected to play the main role in the future air traffic growth, PARSIFAL has faced the challenge of designing an aircraft of the same category, hence compatible with current airports and with most of their infrastructures, but with higher mission performance.
PARSIFAL has achieved relevant results which demonstrate that comparing the designed PrP to a conventional competitor, represented by the common reference model called CeRAS-CSR01, the fuel consumption per passenger can be reduced up to 20%, with a significant impact on environment and market opportunities. This performance improvement is made possible thanks to the adoption a wider fuselage, which increases the number of passengers from less than 200 to more than 300, without enlarging the wingspan. Whereas for any conventional tube-wing configuration this change would be detrimental for the wingspan efficiency, the box-wing system efficiency is weakly affected, hence the aerodynamic efficiency of such aircraft configuration remains high.
The impact assessment analysis has been facing all the aforementioned aspects, providing results about the potential advantages in terms of global warming and noise annoyance reduction, increase of profitability for airlines, possibility for travellers to fly at lower costs, possibility for airport managers to introduce PrP aircraft without affecting airport logistics and infrastructures.
In addition, PARSIFAL has achieved the additional goal of developing design tools and procedures, suitable for the implementation in collaborative Multi-Disciplinary Optimization processes. All the partners have provided their contribution for such achievement, and many design tools have been set-up and calibrated for this purpose.
Among additional project results, it is worth mentioning the successful test of a scaled radio-controlled flying demonstrator, which allows to push the TRL resulting from the project beyond the expected level.
