Global-Warming-Optimized Aircraft Design

The high-level objective of the proposed GLOWOPT project is the development and validation of Climate Cost Functions (CCFs) with respect to minimizing global warming and their application to the multidisciplinary design optimization of next-generation aircraft for relevant market segments.

Several objectives are set in order to reach this target. The first objective is to provide an overview of the state of the art on the scientific background of the relation between aircraft design and operation and its climate impact. The second objective is to derive characteristic aircraft design requirements, primarily payload and range, based on statistical data analysis of the worldwide aircraft fleet and route structure for future entries into Service using a comprehensive air traffic forecast model. The third objective is to develop climate cost functions for the use in the aircraft design optimisation, which reliably represent the climate impact of CO2, NOx, H2O emissions, as well as contrail-cirrus effects. The fourth objective is to perform a Multidisciplinary Design Optimization with respect to the climate cost function to find a set of operational parameters, design parameters and aircraft technologies that minimize the climate impact of the aircraft design using an existing MDO environment that applies the developed CCFs as objective function. The fifth and final objective is to perform an assessment of the aircraft designs chosen in order to quantify their impact on important metrics such as landing and take-off noise, emissions and cash operating cost. For this purpose, a higher-fidelity simulation integrating existing flight performance, emission and climate impact models is adapted and applied to simulate the aircraft design solution in an operational environment.