The aerospace industry and TU Delft have set stringent climate goals for themselves and with each passing year, these goals seem all the more implausible. While sustainability in the aerospace industry is envisioned as futuristic, circular, net-zero aircraft, the change rarely comes from the grassroots. Although these technological solutions are undoubtedly our liberators from long-term climate change, there is relatively less focus on the education of engineers who grow up to design these machines. This thesis follows a bottom-up approach which can stimulate pro-environmental attitudes among future aerospace engineers to give ourselves a fighting chance to mitigate climate change.

With increasing usage of fibre-reinforced composites for structural components across the automotive and aerospace industry, it became crucial to understand how this kind of materials behave when subjected to high loading rates, which are encountered in the case of crash events. The current work presents a study on the effect of the strain rate on the compressive mechanical properties of carbon-epoxy laminates. Rectangular and omega-profile cross-section specimens were tested on a servo-hydraulic testing machine at several impact velocities. For all cases, an increase in the mechanical compressive properties of the laminate was found with increasing rates of deformation. Another important aspect is the correct implementation of the strain rate dependent properties on the numerical models used to perform finite element simulations, as it can lead to more accurate impact simulations. A good agreement between experiments and simulations was obtained for both types of cross-section specimens considered.

The thought of being secure has been on the minds of people throughout history. Security is the protection against intended incidents. Intended incidents happen due to a result of a deliberate and planned act. Security systems are implemented in order to set up security precautions which have as main goal the protection of all assets present within the environment under supervision. In recent years security in aviation, and especially in the airport environment, is getting more and more important. The rising variety and growing number of threats upon the airport environment lead to the need for universal and rapid deployment of individual security systems. This caused a segregated way of working of the entire airport security system. The hypothesis arises that this way of working is inefficient, and a performance increase can be achieved when the airport security system would be integrated. This research is aimed at analyzing a possible approach to integrate the airport security system and its influence on the performance indicators of the airport security system. Some performance indicators of the airport security system, such as level of security and level of service, are in conflict with each other. The agent-based modeling approach is used to properly represent the socio-technical nature of the airport security system. This way the individual agents can be modeled with their own set of rules, while addressing the relationships between agents in the airport environment as well. A specially designed security risk scenario, discussing the boundaries of the environment, the type of threats present and the type of threat sources and objects present, forms the basis of the input for the agent-based model. This exploratory graduation thesis provides a first attempt in proposing an approach to integrate the current airport security system in order to increase performance in both the level of security and level of service. Three different configurations of an integrated airport security system are proposed by means of decision data fusion. Findings of this thesis showed the greatest potential improvement of the level of security and the level of service when implementing an integrated adaptive configuration of the airport security system.

Using a data-driven approach, a heterogeneous populated agent-based model of an airport security checkpoint is calibrated and validated. It is found that average performance using the model can be replicated to a sufficient degree. The heterogenous population could become useful when different passenger fractions - with different performance per passenger type - are analysed for different security checkpoint configurations. Furthermore, time-dependent agent performance could improve the models validity.

Due to an exponential growth in the number of shipments of Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS), the amount of these devices operating in the sky has increased remarkably over the last few years. This led to an increasing number of proximity incidents with manned aircraft. Since these devices share certain airspace with rotorcraft, the question arises how much damage a helicopter could sustain after an impact with a UAS. Within this thesis, a risk assessment was completed initially to determine which collision in terms of type of UAS and helicopter impact location poses the highest risk to the operator of the helicopter. Subsequently a validated model of a DJI Phantom III was developed and impacted onto a rotorcraft windshield in explicit Finite Element software. The sustained damage was compared with a simulated bird strike event to determine whether the prevailing certification requirements would suffice to guarantee safety of the crew.

Unmanned aircraft system (UAS) is an emerging technology that is now gaining traction around the world. UAS operations are expected to be integrated into very-low-level rural and urban airspace via the enabling of the novel concept of unmanned traffic system (UTM). For such operations to become a reality, one of the major challenges that needs to be overcome is the assessment and, subsequently, mitigation of safety risk posed to third parties on the ground. Third parties on the ground refer to people or pedestrians that resides within the area of operation but are not involved with the operation. To assess this risk, an approach called third-party risk (TPR) assessment has been developed in many research. Prediction of TPR of UAS operations will allow operators, authorities and stakeholders make well-informed decision on the deployment of UAS operations. If the TPR risk level of the designed operational concept exceeds the acceptable risk level, then risk mitigation can then be applied. In a typical TPR model, one of the important sub-models is the collision consequence model used to predict probability of fatality (PoF) of human subjected to UAS collision. This sub-component requires a good understanding of human fatality due to inflicted injury by UAS collision which is, at this time of writing, still under-studied. This thesis addresses the key component of the TPR framework that is the quantification of UAS collision consequence on human on the ground. The central aim of this thesis is to develop a quantitative, model-based collision consequence model of UAS collision on human. To achieve this main aim, a series of interrelated research studies was performed in a systematic way.@en