Prediction of aircraft engine emissions using ADS-B flight data

Abstract

Real-time flight data from the Automatic Dependent Surveillance–Broadcast (ADS-B) has been integrated, through a data interface, with a flight performance computer program to predict aviation emissions at altitude. The ADS-B, along with data from Mode-S, are then used to ‘fly’ selected long-range aircraft models (Airbus A380-841, A330-343 and A350-900) and one turboprop (ATR72). Over 2,500 flight trajectories have been processed to demonstrate the integration between databases and software systems. Emissions are calculated for altitudes greater than 3,000 feet (609m) and exclude landing and take-off cycles. This proof of concept fills a gap in the aviation emissions inventories, since it uses real-time flights and produces estimates at a very granular level. It can be used to analyse emissions of gases such as carbon dioxide ( $\mathrm{CO}_2$ ), carbon monoxide (CO), nitrogen oxides ( $\mathrm{NO}_x$ ) and water vapour on a specific route (city pair), for a specific aircraft, for an entire fleet, or on a seasonal basis. It is shown how $\mathrm{NO}_x$ and water vapour emissions concentrate around tropospheric altitudes only for long-range flights, and that the cruise range is the biggest discriminator in the absolute value of these and other exhaust emissions.

Landing gear ground manoeuvre statistics from automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast transponder data

“…It is expected that these future developments will not be limited to aircraft landing gear and that ADS-B-derived data will be used to support many aspects of aircraft structural and system design, along with enhancing aircraft operations. The wide range of previous applications of ADS-B data were discussed previously in Section 1.2, and the most recent applications of ADS-B data have considered the estimation of aircraft emissions from ADS-B data sources (53,54) . It is hoped that this paper has highlighted how ADS-B data can be used to support not just aircraft operations via structural health monitoring but also the design of future aircraft through better informed fatigue spectra and operational usage data.…”

Fuel Burn Method Assessment Using Automatic Dependent Surveillance–Broadcast and European Reanalysis Data: Limited Flight Sample Analysis

“…A range of mass between 60% and 90% of the maximum take-off mass was used. Similar studies for global emission modeling from ADS-B are also studied in [13][14][15][16].…”

“…In papers by Filippone et al [15,16], real-time ADS-B data from OpenSky network were integrated with flight performance computer program FLIGHT [17] to predict aviation emissions at altitude. They used ADS-B with Mode S to fly the route and calculate aircraft emissions based on the ability to calculate thrust.…”

Using the OpenSky ADS-B Data to Estimate Aircraft Emissions

“…The main gaps in knowledge are the atmospheric conditions and the gross take-off weight. It has been previously demonstrated [9] that particularly for long range, the required range is a better discriminator than take-off weight when it comes to estimating emissions. Therefore, we use the following estimate for the weight W:…”