Project 012: Aircraft Design and Performance Tool Connectivity with AEDT

R.  John Hansman; Juan  J. Alonso

doi:10.7273/000001718

T he FAA Office of Environment and Energy has devoted considerable effort and resources to the development of the Aviation Environmental Design Tool (AEDT) to perform full four-dimensional analyses, using arbitrary levels of detail and complexity, of the NAS and its environmental and economic impacts. AEDT relies on models of aircraft performance supplied to it by external aircraft modeling capabilities for the quantification of fuel burn, emissions, and noise at the source (the aircraft being considered), as well as the trajectories to be flown by said aircraft. As stated in the ASCENT COE Project Notice, there is an interest on the side of the FAA to enhance the variety of external tools that may be used to supply aircraft performance / environmental impact information to AEDT. This work describes the efforts that were pursued over the course of the past 13 months to create a module for SUave (the Stanford University Aerospace Vehicle Environment) that enables full connectivity with AEDT and is used to create a database of AEDT aircraft that is representative of aircraft flying today (in all five aircraft classes and with specific models as needed). In addition, we also showcased some of the unique capabilities of SUave, by demonstrating the introduction of an advanced technology that would require higher-fidelity tools to be used within SUave into a particular aircraft class. Such an advanced technology aircraft was made available to AEDT for further analysis. The addition of this new module (from SUave to AEDT) has the benefit of ensuring that a more diverse set of aircraft analysis / design tools can be interfaced with AEDT and that, as future aircraft configurations (and aircraft technologies and/or mission specification changes) need to be modeled, they are incorporated into aircraft design processes with a sufficiently-high level of fidelity so that the input information provided to AEDT can credibly be used to assess system-level impacts.

Project 012: Aircraft Design and Performance Tool Connectivity with AEDT

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