Conceptual aircraft design for environmental impact : modeling operations for emissions assessment

Decisions that guide technology investment and policy-making for the future of air transportation will be based in part on the tradeoffs between environmental performance and economics. The Environmental Design Space (EDS) project explores the tradeoffs between noise, emissions, and economics for conceptual design of future aircraft. A key component to EDS is modeling the emissions of aircraft in operation. Traditional design tools need more detailed mission analysis to calculate operational emissions in the landing and takeoff cycle (LTO), and in cruise. This thesis presents a methodology for modeling an aircraft flight profile and the corresponding aircraft and engine states required to calculate emissions over that mission. The methodology was implemented as an operations model in EDS. The development of the methodology and demonstrations of the model are presented in this thesis. The model takes user-input flight procedures, including mission range, and uses aerodynamic models and engine models from EDS to calculate flight profiles. The operations model can be used for analyzing the relationships between flight procedures, and emissions and fuel burn for a fixed design. Alternatively, multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO) with EDS and the operations model can be used to optimize the aircraft design for minimized emissions in the flight profile.

Department dc:contributor.department

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

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2005

Author dc:creator

• King, Daniel J., S.M. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Karen 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/1721.1/34138

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/34138