Kai Wicke

Insect Contamination Impact on Operational and Economic Effectiveness of Natural-Laminar-Flow Aircraft

The objective of this paper is to investigate the effect of insect contamination on operational and economic effectiveness of an aircraft with natural laminar flow wings designed by DLR. It is intended to show how insect debris located close to the wing leading edge influence fuel consumption on single missions as well as economic metrics like net present value. The focus will be on short-to-medium haul operations, i.e., aircraft similar to current state-of-the-art 150 passenger seated aircraft. During the analysis process tools for aircraft design, mission simulation and computation, insect contamination as well as life-cycle cost assessment will be used. The overall goal is to provide aircraft operators with a better understanding of the operational behavior of natural laminar flow aircraft under realistic operational boundary conditions and related economic implications.

Impact of Cloud Encounter Mitigation Procedures on Operational and Economic Effectiveness of HLFC Aircraft

The objective of this paper is to investigate the effect of cloud encounter mitigation procedures on operational and economic effectiveness of aircraft with hybrid laminar flow control (HLFC) based on real-world flight routes and weather data. The objective is to evaluate whether cloud mitigation procedures are an appropriate measure to maximize the expected benefit of HLFC-technology under realistic meteorological boundary conditions. A global analysis of cloud encounter on typical airline routes has been conducted based on atmospheric data provided by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. Different routing procedures have been benchmarked against each other and the most appropriate procedure for daily flight operation will be discussed. For optimizing the daily route planning of HLFC aircraft with respect to cost (direct routing with cloud Encounter and performance losses vs. re-routed flightpath) models for lateral trajectory optimization and calculation have been applied.