Stream Life Cycle Assessment Model for Aircraft Preliminary Design

Abstract

The growing environmental public awareness and the consequential pressure on every industrial field has made environmental impact assessment increasingly important in the last few years. In this scope, the most established tool used in the specialized literature is the life cycle assessment. Applying this method to the life cycle of an aircraft requires it to be broken down into at least four phases: production, operation, maintenance and disposal. In the assessment, the evaluation of the environmental impact of fuel consumption can be performed linearly and has already been studied over many years, while calculating the impact of other life phases is more complicated, and it is still under study. This paper describes a simple and effective method developed to assess the environmental impact of an aircraft at a preliminary design stage and the implemented model that resulted from it. A detailed consideration of all life cycle phases is essential to serve as a reference for the ecological assessment of novel aircraft concepts. Thereby, the developed method is based on some parametric equations that take into account preliminary information, such as the mass breakdown, the technology used and some program considerations. The results obtained have been compared with those of the literature for verification and validation and have proved to be quite reliable. In fact, the comparison with known analyses, conducted on individual aircraft in a very precise manner, has showed that the proposed model is capable of giving results that fell within ±10% of the reference values. This is due to the broad generality of the model, which does not require a large number of specific data as a starting point to obtain reasonably reliable results for use during project development. In the near future, the use of this model can assist the design of aircraft architectures that comply with the European Green Deal of reducing net greenhouse gas emissions by at least 55% by 2030 and of having no net emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050.