Environmental Aspects on Airplane Design

Airplane design consists of putting together several thousand parts to ultimately fulfill a set of requirements defined principally by airlines, manufacturers, and certification authorities. From the traditional perspective of an airline, an interesting airplane is one that can generate the highest revenue with minimum operating cost – a maximum profit airplane. However, the airline industry is constantly broadening its consideration of what constitutes a nice-to-buy airplane. In recent times, not only economics, but also environmental considerations, are taking part in fleetplanning considerations. Following this trend induced by environmentally-aware passengers, and noise and pollution-related charges, airplane conceptual design methodologies are being expanded to incorporate methodologies for preliminary assessment of airplane noise and emissions. This chapter presents some methodologies for assessing airplane noise and emissions during the conceptual design phases.

Keywords: Aircraft conceptual design, Airframe noise, Emissions, Engine noise, Environmental issues, Multi-disciplinary design and optimization.