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This paper describes the impact of noise on the civil aircraft design process. The challenge to design ‘silent’ aircraft is the development of efficient airframe-engine technologies, for which integration is essential to produce an optimum aircraft, otherwise penalties such as higher fuel consumption, and, or noise are a concern. A description of work completed by Cranfield University will cover design methodologies used for a Broad delta airframe concept, with reference to future studies into alternate concepts. Engine cycle designs for ultra-high bypass ratio, constant volume combustor, and recuperated propulsion cycles are described, with a discussion of integration challenges within the airframe.

As aviation is one of the fastest growing industrial sector world wide, air-traffic emissions are projected to increase their stake in the contribution to global warming. According to recent studies, both CO2 and contrails will be the principal air-traffic pollutants. Since the environmental impact of contrails is potentially larger, their avoidance is becoming discussed in the aeronautical community. Work on this topic has been carried out at Cranfield University in form of a PhD project. A project summary is given in this paper where contrail avoidance strategies and the different aspects of contrail avoidance are highlighted. The first section provides an overview on the formation principles of contrails based on a literature review. Different technologies are given in the second part, and their introduction is discussed in the last section.

The objective of this work is to investigate the thin water film characteristics by performing a range of experiments for different icing conditions. Our focus is on the SLD conditions where the droplets are larger and other effects like splashing and re-impingement could occur. Three features for the thin water film have been studied experimentally: the water film velocity, wave celerity and its wavelength. The experiments are performed in the icing facilities at Cranfiled University. The stability of the water film for the different conditions has been studied to find a threshold for transient from continues water film to non-continues form. A new semi-empirical method is introduced to estimate the water film thickness based on the experimental data of water film velocity in combination of theoretical analysis of water film dynamics. The outcome of this work could be implemented in SLD icing simulation but more analysis is needed.

Significant effort has been applied to the introduction of automation for the structural assembly of aircraft. However, the equipping of the aircraft with internal services such as hydraulics, fuel, bleed-air and electrics and the attachment of movables such as ailerons and flaps remains almost exclusively manual and little research has been directed towards it. The problem is that the process requires lengthy assembly methods and there are many complex tasks which require high levels of dexterity and judgement from human operators. The parts used are prone to tolerance stack-ups, the tolerance for mating parts is extremely tight (sub-millimetre) and access is very poor. All of these make the application of conventional automation almost impossible. A possible solution is flexible metrology assisted collaborative assembly. This aims to optimise the assembly processes by using a robot to position the parts whilst an operator performs the fixing process.

Current modelling capability for engine icing accretion prediction is still limited for App. C. To further validate icing codes in complex engine geometries, it is necessary to perform additional experimental work in relevant geometrical and environmental conditions. Within the frame of ICE GENESIS [1], an experiment has been setup to replicate the condition at the inlet of an engine first stage compressor. This paper describes the choices for the design of the engine compressor model, the setup within the icing wind tunnel and the methodology employed to obtain the results. Additionally, more effort has been focused on obtaining accurate ice shapes using a 3D scanning system. Results of 3D scans are given.

The present work focuses on developing an integrated airframe, distributed propulsion, and power management methodology for liquid-hydrogen-fuelled HALE UAVs. Differently from previous studies, the aim is to assess how the synergies between the aforementioned sub-systems affect the integrated system power requirement, production, and distribution. A design space exploration study was carried out to assess the influence of distributing motor-driven fans on three different airframes, namely a tube-and-wing, a triple-fuselage, and a blended-wing-body. For the considered range of take-off masses from 5,000 to 15,000 kg, the 200 kW payload power requirement under examination was found to re-shape the endurance trends. In fact, the drop in specific fuel consumption due to the engine design point change alters the trends from nearly flat to a 25% maximum endurance increase when moving towards heavier take-off masses.

Dents on the aircraft skin are frequent and may easily go undetected during airworthiness checks, as their inspection process is tedious and extremely subject to human factors and environmental conditions. Nowadays, 3D scanning technologies are being proposed for more reliable, human-independent measurements, yet the process of inspection and reporting remains laborious and time consuming because data acquisition and validation are still carried out by the engineer. For full automation of dent inspection, the acquired point cloud data must be analysed via a reliable segmentation algorithm, releasing humans from the search and evaluation of damage. This paper reports on two developments towards automated dent inspection. The first is a method to generate a synthetic dataset of dented surfaces to train a fully convolutional neural network. The training of machine learning algorithms needs a substantial volume of dent data, which is not readily available.