Investigation into the effects of advanced technologies on overall aircraft performance in a collaborative design environment

Investigation into the effects of advanced technologies on overall aircraft performance in a collaborative design environment

Higgs, T.A.C.

La Rocca, G. (mentor)
Moerland, E. (mentor)

Aerospace Engineering

Flight Performance and Propulsion

2015-10-22

For the past decades concerns over the effect of aviation on the local air quality have risen, with mitigation remaining a priority for industry. To meet the CO2 reduction goal of 75% compared to 2005 levels, set out by the European Commission report 'Flightpath 2050', more assessment on future aircraft technologies and their potential in meeting these goals is needed. Analysis of these technologies requires increased amount of disciplines being involved in the conceptual design stage through the use of physics-based methods. With the amount of computational budget and knowledge needed by specialists during this stage increasing, methods for effective management is needed. Multidisciplinary collaborative design aims at reducing the analysis burden placed on engineers by distributing computational load among numerous involved parties. Collaboration comes with technical and non-technical issues. Work at DLR in the last few years has focused on tackling some of these issues with the development of the Remote Component Environment (RCE), an integration framework, and the Common Parametric Aircraft Configuration Scheme (CPACS). From projects, such as "VAMP", it has been shown that issues in effective communication between teams of experts with different specialists still exist in large collaborative design projects. Identifying common knowledge among the involved specialists, such as inter-disciplinary correlations, has shown to assist in this effective communication. In this project a visualisation tool has been developed in order to easily identify and present these correlations. This is accomplished through the use of Response Surface Modeling techniques in order to generate real-time functioning 2D and 3D plots from given data sets. The functionality of this tool is demonstrated throughout this report with the data obtained from analyses in this study. In order to assess the potential of advanced technologies a study is performed. Fuel consumption can be assumed to be directly linked to CO2 emissions, thus within this study analysis of fuel consumption is performed. Cost savings in future aircraft will also play a crucial role for airliners and passengers, and therefore is also analysed within this study. In order to perform this study an analysis workflow system was developed for the design of a mid-range conventional passenger aircraft from top-level requirements. This workflow was developed in the RCE collaborative integration environment and from joining tools from a physics-based toolkit developed at DLR. So-called adjustment modules were developed and integrated into this workflow in order to artificially adjust basic parameters at different stages of the analysis workflow, thus mimicking the effects of certain technologies. These technologies included retrofittable technologies, such as winglets, geared-turbofans, and lightweight cabin materials, as well as non-retrofittable technologies, including Natural Laminar Flow (NLF), Active Load Alleviation (ALA), and composite structures. Through these adjustments two analyses were performed. One in which the wing was fixed to the reference aircraft planform, and another in which the wing area was adjusted according to the reference wing loading and changes in MTOM from the artificial adjustments. From these analyses the potential fuel and cost savings of a number of case studies were performed. For a case in which technologies were retrofitted onto an A320-like aircraft, a potential fuel savings of 16-24% and cost savings of 4-6% was estimated. For a case in which a number of both non-retrofittable and retrofittable technologies were implemented at the start of development of the same aircraft, a potential fuel savings of 26-36% and cost savings of 9-13% was estimated.

Multidisciplinary collaborative design
technological assessment
artificial adjustment
conceptual aircraft design
workflow integration

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:155a86db-60c3-45ac-99fd-0f6e9cf7d65f

Student theses

master thesis

(c) 2015 Higgs, T.A.C.