PARSIFAL Project: a Breakthrough Innovation in Air Transport

Abstract

PARSIFAL is a Horizon 2020 project, started on May 2017, with the aim to design an innovative aircraft, based on the "PrandtlPlane" (PrP) configuration, for the civil aviation of the future. The PrP configuration allows us to reduce the fuel consumption and the external noise, especially during low speed flight. The high aerodynamic performances are used to limit the span to 36m, compliant with ICAO Aerodrome Reference Code C standard, and to extend the payload capacity to 250-350 passengers without significant penalties of aerodynamic efficiency. The paper presents the overall characteristics of this innovative aircraft and how the PrP configuration could allow to improve the civil air transport of the future, as far as aircraft manufacturers, airports, airlines and passengers are concerned; in particular, some aspects of the architectural solutions and the aerodynamic design and optimization are underlined in subsonic and transonic regimes. Some details are given here on the fuselage design and the lifting system.

Disciplinary Implications of a System Architecting Approach to Collaborative Aircraft Design

“…This is the case for the boxwing configuration from the PARSIFAL project, which is commonly referred to as Prandtl-Plane. The layout is the outcome of highly specialized design tools, provided by the University of Pisa [37,1], which do not support CPACS. In order enable distributed design as outlined above, it is therefore necessary to assemble a CPACS data set using data from a variety of sources.…”

“…In the face of growing public awareness of environmental issues such as climate change, the pressure to provide efficient and ecological new air transport solutions is higher than ever on the aviation community. To this aim, unconventional aircraft configurations, which are radically different from the established tube-and-wing architecture, may hold a lot of potential [1]. However, OEMs today usually shy away from such configurations due to the significantly increased uncertainty and entrepreneurial risk connected to such drastic design changes.…”

PrandtlPlane wing-box least-weight design: A multi-scale optimisation approach

“…The PrP lifting system considered in this work is the result of a preliminary aerodynamic study presented in [40,41]. The PrP lifting system can be ideally split into three (semi-)wings: the front wing (FW), the rear wing (RW) and the vertical wing (VW), as shown in Fig.…”

“…This algorithm, called AEROSTATE (AERodynamic Optimisation with STAtic stability and Trim Evaluator), is based on the AVL (Athena Lattice Vortex) method [54] as a solver, and it has been used for the preliminary study for the reference configuration definition, together with medium and high fidelity corrections. For more details, the reader is addressed to [41,55,56]. For the sake of simplicity, five LCs have been considered.…”

Preliminary Take-Off Analysis and Simulation of PrandtlPlane Commercial Aircraft

“…The PrP configuration here investigated is the result of the first design loop performed in PARSIFAL project, described in details in [26][27][28][29] (Fig. 3).…”