Analysis of driving parameters for green flight trajectories

Analysis of driving parameters for green flight trajectories

Grande Pardo, J.

Grewe, V. (mentor)

Aerospace Engineering

Control & Operations

Aircraft Noise and Climate Effects (ANCE)

2016-10-29

Climate change is an important problem nowadays. There are several industries causing this problem. One of them is the air transport industry. In order to reduce its induced climate impact there are different approaches: design of new aircrafts or engines, use of alternative fuels, more efficient air traffic management, or re-routing. All of them except re-routing aim on reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Re-routing, on the other hand, aims on reducing the climate impact of non-CO2 emissions (that considerably alter their climate impact depending on the region of the atmosphere where they are released) by increasing slightly the carbon dioxide emissions. This study focuses on this last approach. It establishes an analysis of the results obtained within the REACT4C project (Reducing Emissions from Aviation by Changing Trajectories for the benefit of Climate). The project aims to reduce aircraft induced climate impact in the North Atlantic flight corridor by changes in flight trajectories and considers fleets of around 400 aircraft. Moreover, this project considers eight different weather patterns (three for summer and five for winter), two flight directions (westbound and eastbound), and three climate metrics. Therefore, a total of 48 configurations have to be studied. Moreover it considers six different climate parameters causing the total climate impact. The climate parameters are carbon dioxide, water vapor, contrails, and NOx. The NOx climate impact is obtained as the summation of ozone, methane, and primary mode ozone climate impacts. The results that are analyzed are the climate impact caused by each of the climate parameters and how this climate impact changes when applying gradual changes on the aircraft trajectories. The analysis shows that water vapor has a negligible effect on climate impact. Carbon dioxide climate impact is more relevant when considering long term time horizons. Also, it increases when more trajectories are modified since the fuel consumption increases. Contrails are the main driver of the optimization for seven out of eight weather patterns. Their climate impact goes down during the optimization. Moreover, they are more important when considering short term time horizons and westbound flights. NOx is driving the optimization for only one weather pattern. Its contribution to reduce the total climate impact during the optimization is higher in the long term due to the enhanced net-cooling effect caused by methane depletion. Moreover, it is more important for eastbound flights. However, for winter weather patterns, NOx is controlled mainly by methane and primary mode ozone during most part of the optimization. Ozone is only important in the first and last segments. In addition, ozone presents the highest values of climate impact and has more contribution in the short term; while methane has always a negative climate impact or net-cooling effect due to its depletion, and is more important in the long term. The climate impact reduction is caused in the first part of the optimization by a small number of flights that reduce considerably their climate impact. Their trajectories change to go through regions of the atmosphere where their climate impact is smaller. As the optimization progresses, there are more flights modifying their routes. However, their climate impact reduction is not as noticeable as in the first cases. This happens because the regions of the atmosphere where the emissions have a lower climate impact are busier with the prior flights. Therefore the latter flights changing their trajectories have less potential to reduce their climate impact. This leads to a small part of the fleet causing an important climate impact reduction while the vast majority of flights slightly reduce their climate impact.

Climate impact
eco-friendly re-routing
REACT4C project
North Atlantic flight corridor
Climate Cost Functions
aircraft routing
aircraft emissions

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:9f238a03-4e0e-4e43-9159-a2c8b2689747

Student theses

master thesis

(c) 2016 Grande Pardo, J.