Multidisciplinary design optimization of airframe and engine for emissions reduction

Consideration of the environmental impact of aircraft has become critical in commercial aviation. The continued growth in air traffic has come with increasing concerns and demands to reduce aircraft emissions and this has imposed new constraints on the design and development of future airplane concepts. In this work, an environmental design framework has been developed to design and optimize aircraft for specific environmental metrics. Multidisciplinary design optimization is used to optimize aircraft by simultaneously considering airframe, engine and mission design. The environmental metrics considered include fuel burn, landing-takeoff NOx and fuel burn per distance flown. Additional concepts such as the design of large aircraft for short ranges are also presented. Multi-objective optimization is also used to illustrate the tradeoffs between the various environmental objective functions.