Abstract
The rapid growth of air travel and aviation emissions in recent years has contributed to an increase in climate impact. Contrails have been considered one of the main factors of the aviation-induced climate impact. This paper deals with the formation of persistent contrails and its relationship with fuel consumption and flight time when flight altitude and true airspeed vary. Detailed contrail formation conditions pertaining to altitude, relative humidity and temperature are formulated according to the Schmidt–Appleman criterion. Building on the contrail formation model, the proposed model would minimise total travel time, fuel consumption and contrail length associated with a given flight. Empirical data (including pressure, temperature, relative humidity, etc.) collected from seven flight information regions in Chinese observation stations were used to analyse the spatial and temporal distributions of the persistent contrail formation area. The trade-off between flight time, fuel consumption and contrail length are illustrated with a real-world case. The results provided a valuable benchmark for flight route planning with environmental, flight time, sustainable flight trajectory planning and fuel consumption considerations, and showed significant contrail length reduction through an optimal selection of altitude and true airspeed.
Highlights
With the number of commercial aircraft increasing by 131% between 1990 and 2010, the civil aviation industry experienced a rapid growth in terms of passenger demand [1,2,3]
This paper focuses on contrail formation and its relationship with fuel consumption and flight time when flight altitude and true airspeed vary
Detailed contrail formation conditions pertaining to altitude, relative humidity and temperature were formulated according to the Schmidt– Appleman criterion
Summary
With the number of commercial aircraft increasing by 131% between 1990 and 2010, the civil aviation industry experienced a rapid growth in terms of passenger demand [1,2,3]. Such intensified air traffic comes at the expense of significant energy consumption and negative environmental impact [6,7,8,9] This rapid growth has contributed to an increase in pollution, which affects public health [10] as well as global climate change. Though emissions from aircraft engines are similar to other emissions resulting from fossil fuel combustion, they are unusual, as they are emitted at a high altitude (the upper troposphere and the lower stratosphere) These emissions are important environmental concerns, as a result of their global impact on climate change. The optimisation problem proposed in this paper seeks a balance between flight time, fuel consumption and contrail length, by quantitatively analysing their trade-off.
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