ENSURING THE NEXT GENERATION GREEN AIRCRAFT’ SUSTAINABILITY FROM THE DESIGN PHASE VIA A LIFE CYCLE COST ANALYSIS

Sustainable development should be a core principle for current aviation industry, aiming to design aircraft with alternative energy sources and/or innovative configuration solutions. To ensure sustainable aircraft, Life Cycle Cost (LCC) analysis becomes paramount since the early phase of a design process. Among the possible approaches for the LCC analysis, the top-down ones produce Cost Estimation Relationships (CERs) correlating costs, technical information, and system parameters, while the bottom-up ones (i.e., “engineering approaches”) allow obtaining accurate cost estimates relying on the collection of detailed information on a product and its associated life cycle processes. Since the adoption of a top-down approach is not recommended for estimating the cost of products utilizing novel technologies, this paper proposes a hybrid LCC/CER model for next generation green aircraft. The approach is meant to be used starting from the design phase, which is based on an engineering-based approach that is integrated with CERs when needed, i.e., parameters with no chance to access physical data. To account for any uncertainty sources related to the use of CERs and of data not specifically suited for next-generation green aircraft, the parameters of the CERs are described by means of probability density functions to investigate uncertainty in different scenarios. The model is applied via the design process of a 50-seat regional aircraft composed of aluminum and composites. The results and model could be integrated in a Multi-Disciplinary Optimization framework for facing the design challenges of next-generation green aircraft.