STUDIO AMBIENTALE E DELLE PRESTAZIONI DI UN MOTORE AERONAUTICO PER LA PREVISIONE DELLA FORMAZIONE DI SCIE DI CONDENSAZIONE

During years, the aviation sector has never stopped his growth up to be affordable and safe transportation mean. While aviation has contributed to open new markets and enlarge the existing ones making distances “shorter”, it led to increasing the global warming issue due to different emissions that aircraft each day release into the atmosphere; mostly CO2, contrails, NOx. Although the contrails-induced greenhouse effect is potentially stronger than the impact induced by other aircraft emissions, they do not fall under ICAO regulations. Because it is supposed that contrails will soon subjected to international regulations, the aviation industry is working to reduce this type of emissions in order to avoid future sanctions that could damage airlines and the industry itself. Over the years many concepts have been studied to avoid contrails formation including a device capable of extracting the water responsible for their formation from the exhaust gases and then store it onboard. The present work focuses on the creation of a computational model able to forecast where along the flight path there is the probability that persistent contrails will form. In this way, it could be possible to activate the device in that zone to collect only the potentially dangerous water and thus make the aircraft lighter and reduce the fuel consumption. Still, long and mid-short haul aircraft performance with water collection layout were evaluated. As explained at the end of this dissertation, this code will be useful to estimate just before the planned flight the extra-fuel that an aircraft will need both to avoid contrails and reach the destination airport. Thanks to this code it was indeed possible to assess the average burnt fuel penalty both for small and big commercial airliners. It ranged between 8% and 2% for an A380 and lower than 2% for a B737-800 showing that the water collection technique has potential to become an affordable avoiding contrails technique.