Increasing Fuel Efficiency for Short to Medium Range Market: A Conceptual Aircraft Design Study on Unconventional Configurations

Abstract

Selecting the most promising aircraft configuration for the future short to medium range market segment is a challenging task in aircraft design. Many different unconventional aircraft configurations claim to reduce fuel consumption over a conventional evolutionary design approach, but comparison between the different concepts is often difficult. Hence, within the project NACOR (New innovative Aircraft COnfigurations and Related issues), a downselection process was applied that starts from a wide range of different unconventional aircraft configurations and gradually eliminating configurations that show lower fuel saving potential, while at the same time the applied methods increase in fidelity. The first downselection was based on expert judgement to evaluate the initial variation of twelve different unconventional aircraft configurations. For the second downselection, a literature study was conducted and an assessment process on very-low level of fidelity was applied. The third downselection employed an already established overall aircraft design (OAD) process, which was complemented for the remaining configurations. The final downselection further enhanced the OAD process, and sensitivity studies were conducted to investigate the potential of the configurations. The final result indicated that the blended wing body has a high potential to reduce fuel consumption compared to an appropriate conventional tube and wing aircraft design. This is a suitable starting point for subsequent research that will address the detailed design and identify potential challenges.