Reducing Persistent Contrail Formation through Optimization of Flight Trajectories within Operational Constraints
A. Greeve (TU Delft - Aerospace Engineering)
Junzi Sun – Mentor (TU Delft - Operations & Environment)
J. Hoekstra – Graduation committee member (TU Delft - Operations & Environment)
E.J.J. Smeur – Graduation committee member (TU Delft - Control & Simulation)
E.J. Roosenbrand – Graduation committee member (TU Delft - Operations & Environment)
More Info
expand_more
Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.
Abstract
Aviation contributes to global warming not only through its $\text{CO}_2$ emissions, but also through contrail formation. The latter may be combatted by taking this effect into account in flight trajectory optimization. Research already shows some possibilities of doing this, but often lacks integration with the operational limits that airlines need to adhere to. In this paper, an approach is described to first optimize flight trajectories for persistent contrail minimization and then show the feasibility of these trajectories as standard flight plans. This is done by using the open source OpenAP.top trajectory optimizer and atmospheric data. An entire day of European flights in and out of Schiphol are analyzed in determining the potential reduction of climate impact for these flights. It was demonstrated that the amount of persistent contrails can be reduced with optimized trajectories and it was shown that these trajectories can, to a large extent, be approximated by waypoints that are included in standard flight plans.