Periodic Reporting for period 2 - GLOWOPT (Global-Warming-Optimized Aircraft Design)
Período documentado: 2021-03-01 hasta 2022-12-31
In aircraft design studies, fuel burn, maximum take-off mass or direct operating cost are often used as cost functions. However, more than 50% of the climate impact from aviation is stemming from non-CO2 effects. Hence it is essential to include these non-CO2 effects to develop climate optimized aircraft design. The high-level objective of GLOWOPT is to develop novel Climate Functions for Aircraft Design (CFAD) with respect to minimizing climate impact and for their application to the multidisciplinary design optimization of next generation aircraft. The CFAD developed will address the aircraft design process and include the effects of non-CO2 emissions with implicit information about the route network. GLOWOPT established close interaction between scientific partners, aviation stakeholders, and the general public to guarantee broad dissemination of the project results
GLOWOPT directly addresses the specific issue of minimization of global warming by performing an aircraft design optimization based on CFAD that leads to a design solution with substantially lower climate impact compared to a reference design while considering the operating regime of the relevant market segment. GLOWOPT defines a set of top-level requirements for the next generation climate optimized aircraft design. Also, a higher-fidelity assessment of the climate optimized aircraft design developed within GLOWOPT is carried out to validate the CFAD. Finally, GLOWOPT addresses the performance of the climate optimized aircraft in terms of operating cost, noise, and local air quality.
The CFAD are developed as a response surface model with 3-D (latitude, longitude and altitude) emissions distribution as an input in WP 3. The input emission inventories are calculated for varying cruise altitudes and climb angles to determine the influence of the aircraft design performance. These CFAD were then integrated into an existing MDO framework to design climate optimized aircraft designs in WP 4. The climate optimized aircraft design reduced 63% in ATR100 compared to the reference aircraft. This is facilitated by operating at a cruise altitude of 6km and Mach number of 0.63. Low altitude cruise reduces the contrails' impact by 81% and reduced engine overall pressure ratio reduces the NOx impact by 72%. A higher fidelity assessment of the climate optimized aircraft conducted in WP 5 shows that the CFAD are able to estimate the contribution of each climate agent with under 3% relative error. However, the direct operating cost and flight time of the climate optimized aircraft increased by 17% and 23%, respectively, when operated on the entire network compared to the reference aircraft.
Dissemination and communication activities were carried out with continuous exchange with stakeholders. The communication channels were set up, i.e. the web (www.glowopt.eu) and linked-in profile (https://www.linkedin.com/company/glowopt) with satisfying KPIs. Project members participated in several conferences and workshops.
Both members of the GLOWOPT consortium are universities that do research and teach in aerospace and air transportation systems, respectively. By nature, they utilize and exploit the knowledge and experience gained during the course of this project in order to
- further improve the state-of-the-art on environmentally-optimized aircraft design advance
- lectures on aircraft design and operations and thus educate MSc students, PhDs and Postdocs and provide data from the project for their research work