The aviation sector must undergo a revolution as commercial air travel is growing at an impressive pace, and the impact of emissions on climate change at high altitude are deemed very relevant. Currently, aircraft are being operated at multiple routes at a combination of speed and altitude that maximizes revenue. This implies that most transport aircraft fly at altitudes where non-CO2 effects (from NOx emissions, contrail formation etc.) are high, resulting in a negative climate impact. These non-CO2 effects and their climate impact largely depends on the atmospheric state. The targets set by ACARE of 75% CO2 and 90% NOx emission reduction, respectively by 2050 relative to a baseline aircraft from the year 2000 are pushing the aviation industry to rethink how aircraft are designed and operated.
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.
