The Clean Sky Technology Evaluator as part of an European Assessment Capability

Abstract

Clean Sky is a Joint Technology Initiative that aims to develop and mature breakthrough ‘clean technologies’ for air transport. The programme is made up of 6 Integrated Technology Demonstrators (ITD) and the Technology Evaluator (TE), a dedicated evaluation platform. The TE is in charge of assessing the performance of the technologies developed in the ITDs in order to monitor progress towards the ACARE environmental goals and to provide views on aviation footprint in terms of emissions and noise. The assessments are done via a tool suite with state-of-the-art models for simulating air traffic and assessing environmental impacts as well as aircraft models developed specifically by ITDs to represent the environmental performance of their Concept and Reference Technology Aircraft. This reflects an attempt to pool know-how and simulation/modelling capability that exists among industry, research establishments and academia. The approach in the TE is to ‘insert’ 2020 Clean Sky concept aircraft into a number of evaluation scenarios. These concept aircraft are ‘flown’ (i.e. simulation scenarios are run) and the Clean Sky configurations are compared to the most relevant benchmarks: mainly state-of-the-art aircraft of similar size and role in year 2000 (ACARE’s baseline). The comparisons or assessments are performed at three levels: Mission Level (single flight), Airport Level (community impact), and System Level (global fleet footprint) – and quantify reductions wrt. emissions (CO2, NOx) and noise. This presentation will provide information on the applied methodologies and will embed this into the bigger picture – related to this session – of evolving European assessment capabilities.