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Diesel engines have been used on the aeronautical market for a long time. Despite this fact, there are few studies showing the potential cost savings of using this type of technology. In this way, the goal of this paper is to find out whether or not it is advantageous to use an Otto or Diesel cycle engine on general aviation light aircraft. It is well known that both of them have pros and cons, however, the possibility of using Jet A-1 (kerosene) as fuel gives the Diesel engine a clear advantage in a market like Brazil, where the price of the regular piston fuel (AvGas) keeps rising to astonishing values. Throughout this paper, a detailed study of the fixed and variable costs of two similar aircraft, both Cessnas 172 equipped with Otto and Diesel cycle engines is conducted, comparing fuel consumption, performance levels, and other factors.

The aim of this work is to present the preliminary performance studies of the unmanned, lightweight (less than 10 kg), supersonic research aircraft. The studies comprise the typical mission for the aircraft's first supersonic version, based on the aerodynamic, thrust, and mass characteristics presented in a previous work. The aircraft, named as “Pohox”, is an Unmanned Air Vehicle, or “UAV”, and is intended to be the flying test bed for a multi cycle engine capable to provide thrust in subsonic, transonic and supersonic regimes. Different tools have been developed to perform the analysis. In the analysis, different flight paths are considered in order to provide insights in terms of fuel consumption, altitude and speed gain. Aircraft ‘excess power’ diagrams have been generated, to provide guidance for the definition of the flight paths to be analyzed. Drag dependency with Mach number is considered in the analysis.

For many years durability tests engineers have worked in the sense of improving the tests that, at first, were performed using public roads with high time consumption and low reproducibility. Proving grounds were specially designed to reproduce the most important efforts to the body and chassis systems, but time problem was still there. Time and cost reduction allied to the needs of quality, reliability and reproducibility improvement led the engineers to develop methods and equipments to reproduce the durability tests in the lab. In this way the road simulators appear as a powerful tool able to perform durability tests with high reliability, self-controlled and with very low time compared to the road tests. At this scenery bench tests were also created to components and systems mainly used to anticipate problems before a whole vehicle test.