The continuous growth in flight operations has led to public concern regarding the impact of aviation on the environment with its anthropogenic contribution to global warming. Several solutions have been proposed in order to reduce the environmental impact of aviation. However most of them are long term solutions such as new environmental friendly aircraft and engine designs. In this respect, management of aircraft trajectory and mission is a potential short term solution that can readily be implemented. Therefore, in order to truly understand the optimised environment friendly trajectories that can be actually deployed by airlines, it is important to investigate the impact of degraded engine performance on real aircraft trajectories at multi-disciplinary level. Several trajectory optimisation studies have been conducted in this direction in the recent past, but engines considered for the studies were clean and trajectories were ideal and simple. This research aims to provide a methodology to enhance the conventional approach of the aircraft trajectory optimisation problem by including engine degradation and real aircraft flight paths within the optimisation loop (framework); thereby the impact of engine degradation on optimum aircraft trajectories were assessed by quantifying the difference in fuel burn and emissions, when flying a trajectory which has been specifically optimised for an aircraft with degraded engines and flying a trajectory which has been optimised for clean engines. For the purpose of this study models of a clean and two levels of degraded engines have been developed that are similar to engines used in short range and long range aircraft currently in service. Degradation levels have been assumed based on the deterioration levels of Exhaust Gas Temperature (EGT) margin. Aircraft performance models have been developed for short range and long range aircraft with the capability of simulating (generating) vertical and horizontal flight profiles provides by the airlines. An emission prediction model was developed to assess NOx emissions of the mission. The contrail prediction model was adopted from previous studies to predict contrail formation. In addition, a multidisciplinary aircraft trajectory optimisation framework was developed and employed to analyse short range flight trajectories between London and Amsterdam and long range flight trajectories between London and Colombo under three cases. Case_1: Aircraft with clean engines, Case_2 and Case_3 were Aircraft with two different levels of degraded engines having a 5% and 10% Exhaust Gas Temperature (EGT) increase respectively. Three different multi objective optimisation studies were performed; (1) Fuel burn vs Flight time, (2) Fuel burn vs NOx emission, and (3) Fuel burn vs Contrails. Finally optimised trajectories generated with degraded engines were compared with the optimised trajectories generated with clean engines ... [cont].
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:720967 |
| Date | January 2016 |
| Creators | Navaratne, Rukshan |
| Contributors | Sethi, Vishal ; Pilidis, Pericles |
| Publisher | Cranfield University |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://dspace.lib.cranfield.ac.uk/handle/1826/12296 |
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