Abstract
The German Cluster of Excellence SE²A (Sustainable and Energy Efficient Aviation) is established in order to investigate the influence of game-changing technologies on the energy efficiency of future transport aircraft. In this paper, the preliminary investigation of the four game-changing technologies active flow control, active load alleviation, boundary layer ingestion, and novel materials and structure concepts on the performance of a long-range Blended Wing Body (BWB) aircraft is presented. The BWB that was equipped with the mentioned technologies was designed and optimized using the multi-fidelity aircraft design code SUAVE with a connection to the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) code SU2. The conceptual design of the BWB aircraft is performed within the SUAVE framework, where the influence of the new technologies is investigated. In the second step, the initially designed BWB aircraft is improved by an aerodynamic shape optimization while using the SU2 CFD code. In the third step, the performance of the optimized aircraft is evaluated again using the SUAVE code. The results showed more than 60% reduction in the aircraft fuel burn when compared to the Boeing 777.
Highlights
A series of research activities have been carried out all over the world in the recent years to meet the challenges of ambitious reduction in CO2, NOx, and noise emission set by aviation authorities, such as in Flightpath 2050 [1]
Because the initial design of the blended wing body (BWB) aircraft in the EWL project has been done with an in-house tool, in the first step, we assessed the initial configuration of the SE2 A-LR, including the game-changing technologies in Stanford University Aerospace Vehicle Environment (SUAVE), which is an open-source, object-oriented aircraft design environment programmed in Python language with good flexibility, composability, and extensibility [24,31]
A simulate shock-induced separation, which happens in the RANS case; the reduction in the lift is lower in Euler compared to RANS.The drag polar shows that at low lift coefficient, the drag coefficient of RANS matches well with the Euler solutions plus the friction drag from flat plate combination of Euler results with the flat plate analogy shows sufficient accuracy for capturing the aircraft aerodynamics and estimating its mission performance
Summary
A series of research activities have been carried out all over the world in the recent years to meet the challenges of ambitious reduction in CO2 , NOx, and noise emission set by aviation authorities, such as in Flightpath 2050 [1]. The SE2 A project aims at investigating the influence of new technologies as well as new operational scenarios on the sustainability of future transport aircraft. It has been inspired by a lot of relevant work that has been carried in recent decades; some are mentioned in the following. A blended wing body (BWB) concept for long-range commercial aircraft could lead to a fuel saving of 27% as compared to a conventional A380-like tube-and-wing (TAW) configuration, according to the research of Boeing [3]. Fuel savings when neglecting the system penalties the EWL project, several aircraft have been initially designed to represent technology. System-level studies [2]. the function of this technology is to actively suck the air from the aircraft
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