A major challenge in the transport sector is to make economic growth compatible with sustainability and environmental constraints, while remaining competitive and innovative. To achieve ambitious objectives in terms of emissions reduction, the engine integrated technology demonstrators play a priority role. As a matter of fact, among Clean Sky 2 programme, engine demonstrators and technologies are the most important contributors to the emissions reduction aimed in Horizon 2020.
The innovative engine technologies must be investigated by integrating them into a concept aircraft, to assess more precisely their environmental impact. The development of aeronautical products is a complex multidisciplinary process, with requirements and constraints on the complete aircraft system and on its individual components, including the engines. A major issue, which has prevented aircraft manufacturers from implementing efficient and cost-effective design processes, is the loose integration of engine models into iterative aircraft design workflows.
This is the research context of ADORNO, a Clean Sky 2 project aiming to enable fast and reliable estimation of aircraft environmental noise and pollutant emissions at different mission phases, through the implementation of a flexible aircraft model which provides requirements for the engine platform in terms of thrusts and off-takes at different power settings and flight conditions. The development of an aircraft model with an integrated engine interface is in fact the key enabler to deliver innovative and constantly evolving aircraft products in a time and cost-efficient manner, easing the interaction between engine and aircraft designers. This will allow to reduce design times, both in the conceptual and preliminary phases, and will enable engine manufacturers to maintain and strengthen competitiveness.
At the completion of the project, all these main objectives were successfully matched. A tool for preliminary aircraft noise calculations was developed by UNINA and LeadTech, partner in the project, and integrated by MTU, topic manager of ADORNO, in its IT framework. The multi-disciplinary design and analysis framework provided by UNINA for the project, together with a flexible aircraft modeler that can be easily coupled with external engine files, was extensively used to perform trade-off analyses and to carry out the design of two innovative concept models.
