Climate-Compatible Air Transport System—Climate Impact Mitigation Potential for Actual and Future Aircraft

Abstract

Aviation guarantees mobility, but its emissions also contribute considerably to climate change. Therefore, climate impact mitigation strategies have to be developed based on comprehensive assessments of the different impacting factors. We quantify the climate impact mitigation potential and related costs resulting from changes in aircraft operations and design using a multi-disciplinary model workflow. We first analyze the climate impact mitigation potential and cash operating cost changes of altered cruise altitudes and speeds for all flights globally operated by the Airbus A330-200 fleet in the year 2006. We find that this globally can lead to a 42% reduction in temperature response at a 10% cash operating cost increase. Based on this analysis, new design criteria are derived for future aircraft that are optimized for cruise conditions with reduced climate impact. The newly-optimized aircraft is re-assessed with the developed model workflow. We obtain additional climate mitigation potential with small to moderate cash operating cost changes due to the aircraft design changes of, e.g., a 32% and 54% temperature response reduction for a 0% and 10% cash operating cost increase. Hence, replacing the entire A330-200 fleet by this redesigned aircraft (Ma cr = 0.72 and initial cruise altitude (ICA) = 8000 m) could reduce the climate impact by 32% without an increase of cash operating cost.

A simplistic flight model for exergy embodiment of composite materials towards nearly-zero exergy aviation

“…As aviation grows to meet the increasing demand, particularly in fast-growing emerging markets, the IPCC forecasts that its share of global manmade CO 2 emissions will increase to around 3% in 2050 (ATAG, n.d.;IPCC, 2014). In contrast, it is estimated that at least one third of aviation emissions can be reduced through efficiency and changes in operation (Dahlmann et al, 2016). In the quest of reducing CO 2 emissions against global warming, the airline industry has a critical role, although the overall responsibility among other sectors in terms of percentages seems to be relatively small.…”

Airplane Design Optimization for Minimal Global Warming Impact

“…Hence, technological advancements, operational changes, new policies or any combination thereof might have to be adopted to reduce aviation's impact. Previous studies have revealed that the objective of minimizing the global-warming impact, from an aircraft design perspective, does not align with the objective of minimizing direct operating costs (DOC) [4][5][6]. Even when the minimization of fuel consumption is used as the overall design objective, this still does not result in an airframe and engine combination which has a minimal impact on global warming due to non-CO 2 effects [7] and because the optimal cruise altitude is different.…”

“…Such indirect effects on global warming, and other effects such as contrails and contrail cirrus, have to be determined through more advanced climate models and more comprehensive metrics. Examples of the latter are the average temperature response (ATR) [5,6,10] and the global warming potential (GWP) [11].…”

Airworthiness and Conceptual Design Optimization Considerations of the Environmental Impact Assessment of a Supersonic Business Jet Aircraft

“…Although a higher speed would have been more enticing for the clients, the choice of a moderate supersonic Mach number would have resulted in an aircraft with reduced weight, having a positive effect in fuel burn and noise generation [11]. In general, a combination of lower speeds and cruise altitudes facilitates the mitigation of aviation related global warming [12]. Several studies [12,13,14,15] have attempted to assess the aviation climate impact and how this might influence the aircraft design criteria of typical generic or existing subsonic airliners and the novelty of the present study is that it attempts to perform an environmental assessment comparison and to look at aircraft design criteria implications of a particular SSBJ design.…”