Disruptive Green Propulsion Technologies

Description:

As the world becomes increasingly concerned with climate change, international civil aviation’s contribution towards it is in focus.

Conferences on propulsion have primarily focused on evolutionary improvements to conventional gas turbine technologies based on the Brayton Cycle. This special two-day conference is aimed specifically at distributed propulsion and turbo-electric systems, and presenting it as the next disruptive technology.

As the world becomes increasingly concerned with climate change, international civil aviation’s contribution towards it is in focus. 

With the aim to ensure its environmental sustainability for the future, the aviation industry has set stringent and ambitious future environmental goals. In order to achieve these goals it is now in pursuit of revolutionary greener alternatives to the conventional aircraft and propulsion systems– it has set out to discover disruptive technologies. 

The search for future disruptive technologies in aviation requires cross-disciplinary effort. This effort will be focused on feasible airframes and propulsion systems, their optimal integration, application of alternative fuels, aviation safety and reliability, noise reduction and operating cost amongst the key factors. 

Multi-objective assessments have indicated that significant changes in vehicle and propulsion system designs are required to meet the stringent environmental (ICAO, NASA’s N+3 and Flight path 2050) targets of the future. The assessments further indicate that, amongst many evaluated options and despite a significant number of technological challenges, Turbo-electric Distributed Propulsion (TeDP) on a Blended Wing Body (BWB) airframe has the required potential to eventually achieve these targets as this concept will change the nature of the way the aircraft will interact with and affect the environment.