Airplane Design Optimization for Minimal Global Warming Impact

What is it about?

As sustainability in aviation becomes increasingly important, the climate impact of future aircraft design has to be minimized. This climate impact, however, does not simply scale with fuel burn. Therefore, we carried out an aircraft design optimisation, considering engine, airframe and mission variables, to minimize the overall climate impact of the design, including both CO2 and non-CO2 effects in the climate objective. This study shows that flying lower and slower while reducing the engine pressure ratio can significantly reduce the climate impact using state-of-the-art technologies.

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