A First Step Towards the Integration of Life Cycle Assessment into Conceptual Aircraft Design

Abstract

In civil aviation, an increasing awareness of the importance of environmental protection can be noticed. Amongst others, a better environmental protection could be achieved by giving it a higher weighting in the multi objective design optimization of future aircraft as civil aircraft are nowadays mainly designed for lowest operating costs. To be able to include the environmental protection in the design evaluation, the Environmental Impact (EI) of an aircraft has to be known which could be achieved by integrating a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) into conceptual aircraft design. This paper aims at presenting a first step towards the integration of LCA into conceptual aircraft design. The EI of various contributors being part of the life cycle of an entire aircraft fleet have a minor influence on the EI as their impact is distributed over all passenger-kilometers traveled by the whole fleet. Processes occurring each flight have the highest contribution to the EI of an aircraft as their impact is only distributed over the passenger-kilometers of a single flight. An evaluation of the EI using the World ReCiPe H/A method shows that fossil fuel depletion has the highest percentage with around 47 % of the total EI, followed by climate change with an impact of around 44 %. The results of the presented simplified analysis are compared to the results of the few other existing LCA results of aircraft. It is shown that the simple approach of this paper already is in quite a good a agreement with the results of other LCAs. It can be concluded that the presented approach can already be used for a simple, first calculation of the EI of an aircraft. The integration of LCA into conceptual aircraft design will allow to assess and influence the EI of future aircraft over the entire life cycle early in the design process.