Colloquium: Rowan de Voogt (FPT)

This study investigates the optimisation of design variables for the unconventional Flying-V-900 aircraft to minimise its climate impact, taking into account operational costs. The study examines the compromises between operational costs and climate factors. A multidisciplinary analysis and optimisation framework is developed in order to minimise the Flying-V-900’s impact on global warming, cash operating costs, and fuel efficiency.This study investigates the influence of geometry, turbofan engine, and mission design variables on these objectives. The findings indicated that fuel- and cost-optimized designs demonstrated nearly identical performance, whereas a climate-optimised design exhibited contradictory performance. These results indicate that adopting a climate-optimised Flying-V-900 could potentially reduce the impact of global warming, as measured by the average temperature response over a 100-year period, by approximately 60%. However, it is important to note that this transition would come with a significant increase in cash operating costs, specifically by 36%. This analysis considers the impacts of both CO2 and non-CO2 factors, including contrail formation and NO emissions. It demonstrates that the climate-optimised Flying-V aircraft gives priority to flying at a low altitude of 6km and a velocity of Mach 0.60 in order to minimise contrail formation and NO emissions. However, achieving this requires a 20% increase in fleet size to maintain productivity.

Supervisor: R. Vos