Abstract
A simulation-based approach for take-off and landing performance assessments is presented in this work. In the context of aircraft design loops, it provides a detailed and flexible formulation that can be integrated into a wider simulation methodology for a complete commercial aviation mission. As a matter of fact, conceptual and preliminary aircraft design activities require iterative calculations to quickly make performance predictions on a set of possible airplane configurations. The goal is to search for a design that best fits all top level aircraft requirements among the results of a great number of multi-disciplinary analyses, as fast as possible, and with a certain grade of accuracy. Usually, such a task is carried out using statistical or semi-empirical approaches which can give pretty accurate results in no time. However, those prediction methods may be inappropriate when dealing with innovative aircraft configurations or whenever a higher level of accuracy is necessary. Simulation-based design has become crucial to make the overall process affordable and effective in cases where higher fidelity analyses are required. A common example when flight simulations can be effectively used to support a design loop is given by aircraft mission analyses and performance predictions. These usually include take-off, climb, en route, loiter, approach, and landing simulations. This article introduces the mathematical models of aircraft take-off and landing and gives the details of how they are implemented in the software library JPAD. These features are not present in most of the currently available pieces of preliminary aircraft design software and allow one to perform high fidelity, simulation-based take-off and landing analyses within design iterations. Although much more detailed than classical semi-empirical approaches, the presented methodologies require very limited computational effort. An application of the proposed formulations is introduced in the second part of the article. The example considers the Airbus A220-300 as a reference aircraft model and includes complete take-off and landing performance studies, as well as the simulation of both take-off and landing certification noise trajectories.
Highlights
Nowadays the commercial transport aircraft market is strongly influenced by three main factors.The first conditioning factor, of which the aviation sector has been well aware for decades, is the need to reduce air transportation’s environmental impact, as shown by the evermore ambitious targets defined by associations like ATAG and IATA or the Clean Sky 2 consortium
Possible future market scenarios following the worldwide management of the COVID-19 pandemic have been recently provided by ICAO [2]
The authors of the present article have been users of most of the above-mentioned computer programs, and they have reached a mature vision of the set of features one must expect from a modern MDAO software. This vision drove the development, started in 2015, of a modular framework named JPAD (Java application programming interface (API) for Aircraft Designers) that gathers all the lessons learned in the last few decades of in-house tool development for aircraft design [28]
Summary
Nowadays the commercial transport aircraft market is strongly influenced by three main factors.The first conditioning factor, of which the aviation sector has been well aware for decades, is the need to reduce air transportation’s environmental impact, as shown by the evermore ambitious targets defined by associations like ATAG and IATA or the Clean Sky 2 consortium. The latest estimates expect the passenger demand to drop from the above baseline by 861 to 1524 million. The third main circumstance to be considered in the future evolution of the aircraft market is related to the need for most of the major airlines to replace several hundred heritage aircraft, especially in the regional aircraft segment from 20 up to 150 seats. These airplanes are currently in service around the world and are coming to the end of their useful commercial lives
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