Commercial Aircraft Conceptual Design For Minimal Environmental And Economical Impact

With the fast development of aviation industry and the increasing awareness on environmental effect generated by air travel, the design of future civil aircraft needs to take into account its environmental impact and economics at a early stage. This thesis focuses on multi-objective design optimization based on both direct operating cost and environmental effect of future aircraft concept.The evaluation of noise is based on semi empirical method. Both Guo and Fink method have been implemented and preliminary comparisons of the two methods using B737-800 showed that although there are discrepancies between the actual numbers from the two methods, both methods produced similar trend in the noise prediction.The direct operating cost of the concept aircraft is evaluated using domestic method. And relations between environmental impact (noise and emission) and economics are also explored in order to give the designers a full picture on the factors influencing the decision making process. Study showed that increased environmental protection would result in the increase of the economic cost. How to achieve a balanced design in terms of environmental protection and economics is of major interests to future civil aircraft designers. At the end of this thesis, this problem is tackled using multi-objective optimization method, and the designs which achieved low-noise, low-emission and low-cost are obtained subject to performance constraints.