A tool for aircraft eco-design based on streamlined Life Cycle Assessment and Uncertainty Analysis

Abstract

Early product development phases are decisive to determine the environmental impacts of an aircraft during its life cycle. In order to reduce overall environmental impacts, the designers and engineers must be able to assess the consequences of their design choices. In this research, an aircraft eco-design tool was developed to support the decision-making process during the aircraft conceptual design phase. The tool uses a streamlined Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) approach to calculate cradle-to-grave environmental impacts of the aircraft’s life cycle using its design parameters and the ecoinvent database as inputs. The tool performs Uncertainty Analysis via Monte Carlo Simulation (MCS), giving the practitioner insight on the distribution and uncertainty of the results. Input parameters are fitted to Beta-PERT distributions and randomly sampled for each iteration of the MCS. The tool was used to analyze different concepts for a freighter aircraft and a "what-if" scenario, the manufacturing of a composite airframe. The results are coherent with other LCA studies, showing predominance of the operation life cycle stage in all midpoint and endpoint indicators. Furthermore, visualizing the results as distributions rather than single values is of key importance in the decision-making process. The tool is demonstrated to be a versatile eco-design asset for evaluation and comparison of aircraft environmental impacts during the conceptual design phase and may contribute to designing aircraft with minimal environmental impacts.