Stream Life Cycle Assessment Model for Aircraft Preliminary Design

The growing environmental public awareness and the consequential pressure on every
industrial field has made environmental impact assessment increasingly important in the last few
years. In this scope, the most established tool used in the specialized literature is the life cycle
assessment. Applying this method to the life cycle of an aircraft requires it to be broken down into at
least four phases: production, operation, maintenance and disposal. In the assessment, the evaluation
of the environmental impact of fuel consumption can be performed linearly and has already been
studied over many years, while calculating the impact of other life phases is more complicated, and
it is still under study. This paper describes a simple and effective method developed to assess the
environmental impact of an aircraft at a preliminary design stage and the implemented model that
resulted from it. A detailed consideration of all life cycle phases is essential to serve as a reference
for the ecological assessment of novel aircraft concepts. Thereby, the developed method is based
on some parametric equations that take into account preliminary information, such as the mass
breakdown, the technology used and some program considerations. The results obtained have been
compared with those of the literature for verification and validation and have proved to be quite
reliable. In fact, the comparison with known analyses, conducted on individual aircraft in a very
precise manner, has showed that the proposed model is capable of giving results that fell within ±10%
of the reference values. This is due to the broad generality of the model, which does not require a large
number of specific data as a starting point to obtain reasonably reliable results for use during project
development. In the near future, the use of this model can assist the design of aircraft architectures
that comply with the European Green Deal of reducing net greenhouse gas emissions by at least 55%
by 2030 and of having no net emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050.