Exploration and assessment of the environmental design space for commercial aircraft and future technologies

Design and regulatory initiatives for aircraft noise and emissions should appreciate the integrated nature of the aircraft system. The computational ability exists to consider environmental and traditional performance objectives of aircraft concurrently. This context of multi-disciplinary system design is named the Environmental Design Space (EDS) and is studied in this thesis with an integrated aircraft-engine conceptual design framework. With this tool, the objectives of this thesis were to assess the fidelity and level of uncertainty of the design framework, to characterize the tradeoffs between aircraft noise, emissions and aircraft performance and to evaluate the system-level impacts of a future noise reduction technology. Assessment of the EDS framework was accomplished with a probabilistic model assessment methodology. The assessment involved the selection of stochastic inputs and generation of output distributions through Monte Carlo simulations. A sensitivity analysis of the key drivers of uncertainty and the user-defined input distributions is also provided. This methodology was applied to one of the framework modules, the NASA Engine Performance Program (NEPP), and found that the modeling error was subsumed within the modeling uncertainty. A sensitivity study indicated that the component efficiencies had the largest impact on the output distribution. When the level of NEPFP uncertainty was propagated to the system level, the resulting coefficient of variance for fuel burn was 4.1%. The tradeoffs between the competing EDS objectives were characterized through Pareto fronts generated by multi-objective genetic algorithms.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2004

Author dc:creator

• Barter, Garrett E. (Garrett Ehud), 1979-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Karen E. Willcox.

• Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/16653

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/16653