Digital Industry Insider
The aviation industry is booming. The International Air Transport Association forecasts that total passenger numbers will double to 7 billion by 2034, as China overtakes the US as the world's largest market.
It's an incredibly rapid expansion which has significant impact on the environment. But with the acceleration of the development and adoption of clean technology (or "cleantech"), it's a challenge that can be met.
That's the opinion of Ron van Manen, Programme Manager at Clean Sky, who talked to Digital Industry Insider at this year's Farnborough International Airshow.
"We need to take advantage of the window in time, because the next all-new aircraft are likely to be in the second half of the next decade. So you want to use that time to your advantage in terms of absorbing as much technology as you can," van Manen says.
Clean Sky is a public-private partnership that operates between the European Union and the aviation sector to reduce the environmental impact of the industry. Their current Horizon 2020 program, with €8 billion in funding, is charged with increasing the uptake of cleantech in aviation.
"It is about accelerating technology maturation, so getting things to a point where you've de-risked it so the market can absorb the amount of investment needed to adopt it."
Early results of the program
One of Clean Sky's biggest projects to date is focussed on enabling wings to fly with what's called a laminar flow, which means that there is little or no turbulence over the wing.
"This will get you a seven to ten percent fuel burn advantage compared to current technology wings, where there's a roughness. Like water coming through a pipe, if it goes too fast it starts to bubble and fizz and you get more turbulence," van Manen explains.
Clean Sky is working with Airbus to build and test these new wings. The technology is set for test flight in 2017, when they will take an existing aircraft, cut the wings off, put very high tolerance composite wings on, and test fly it.
The technology being developed through the program is likely to be ten years away from being in the marketplace. But it's a patient game worth playing, according to van Manen.
"These type of projects bringing companies together to work on a single piece of technology is a huge de-risking exercise," he explains. "So it brings the risk down to a level where you're doing things in five years like this, and you might be taking twenty years out of the cycle, where private
The three digital tools making this possible
Van Manen identifies three key digital technologies as improving and accelerating the environmental sustainability of aviation.
The first is the digitization of aircraft - or avionics - which impacts the performance through, for example, shorter routes and more accurate takeoffs and landings.
"Then if you look at digital, things are being enabled by better algorithms, better computers, better computing, digitization," van Manen says. "Being able to simulate, as opposed to test, means you can go through a lot of simulation and then only a thin validation layer after that in the physical world."
"You get to a point where in a very compressed timeframe, rather than going down the route of having four or five alternative configurations and running wind tunnel tests and taking data, you can look at 100 different configurations and run computer simulations over a couple of days and very quickly find what the optimum is."
Engineers can then zoom in on those top results and take things further, significantly shortening the design cycle.
The third element is "factories 3.0," or factories of the future, which are really starting to kick in now. What we're seeing is the robotization of production; high production rates in the aircraft industry in an economically viable and technically safe way.
"It's becoming a game changer, this digitization, not just the robot or part assisted manufacturing, but the whole flow from the digital design through to the machine operations and manufacturing."
And van Manen is optimistic that the pace of cleantech innovation can accelerate further as digital applications continue to improve.
"I think there's a lot that we don't yet know, in terms of what technology can bring."
This content was co-created by GE and BI Studios for Digital Industry Insider.
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