Abstract
The activities reported in this paper are part of the project “PARSIFAL” (Prandtlplane ARchitecture for the Sustainable Improvement of Future AirpLanes), funded by the European Community under the Horizon 2020 program and coordinated by the University of Pisa (Italy); the other partners of the project are: Delft University of Technology (The Netherlands), ONERA (France), Arts et Métiers ParisTech-ENSAM (France), DLR (Germany) and SkyBox Engineering (Italy). The paper presents a summary of preliminary design activities, carried out with the project PARSIFAL in order to study the introduction of box-wing aircraft, known as “PrandtlPlane”, in the air transport system. PARSIFAL aims to investigate the adoption of the PrandtlPlane over short-to-medium routes, where aircraft compliant with the ICAO Aerodrome Reference Code “C” operate. According to such ICAO standard, the PrandtlPlane developed in PARSIFAL has a wingspan limited to 36m but, if compared to reference aircraft such as B737 and A320 families aircraft, it can improve the passenger capacity from about 200 to more than 300 units. This paper presents the design steps performed for the definition of a “baseline configuration” of the PrP, introducing the requirements and describing both the conceptual and preliminary design phases, including the high fidelity investigations CFD and FEM analyses.
Highlights
According to several European studies ([1, 2, 3]), novel aircraft configurations as the ones shown in Fig. 1 represent one of the possible way to achieve the following: to fulfil the growth of air traffic demand, which is expected to double in 20 years; to reduce CO2 and NOx emissions and noise per passenger-kilometres; to reduce to 4 hours the time required for a door-to-door journey within Europe.The story of the box-wing configuration called “PrandtlPlane”, or PrP (Fig. 1-right), has started in in 1924 when Ludwig Prandtl found that the so-called “best wing system” (BWS) has the property of minimizing the induced drag for given lift and wingspan ([4])
The present paper deal with the application of the PrP concept to commercial flight, in the framework of the EU funded project PARSIFAL (“Prandtlplane ARchitecture for the Sustainable Improvement of Future AirpLanes”), in which the future challenges of air transport are faced exploiting the aerodynamic advantages of the box-wing through the improvement of payload capabilities without increasing the overall dimensions of the aircraft
1.1 Top Level Aircraft Requirements The requirements adopted in PARSIFAL for the PrP design have been defined starting from the analysis of air traffic demand forecasts for 2030s, in which short-to-medium routes (
Summary
According to several European studies ([1, 2, 3]), novel aircraft configurations as the ones shown in Fig. 1 represent one of the possible way to achieve the following: to fulfil the growth of air traffic demand, which is expected to double in 20 years; to reduce CO2 and NOx emissions and noise per passenger-kilometres; to reduce to 4 hours the time required for a door-to-door journey within Europe. 1.1 Top Level Aircraft Requirements The requirements adopted in PARSIFAL for the PrP design have been defined starting from the analysis of air traffic demand forecasts for 2030s, in which short-to-medium routes ( 1800m, whereas “C” refers to a wingspan < 36m and wheel span between 6m and 9m), initial cruise altitude of 36000ft, Mach number in cruise flight greater than or equal to 0.78
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
