Sustainability Assessment of Composite Aircraft Liquid Hydrogen Tanks Using Multi-Criteria Decision-Making Methods

In this paper, a cradle-to-gate, mathematically robust, sustainability assessment methodology for aircraft components is proposed. The assessment is made by applying the R-TOPSIS multi-criteria decision making method to nine different criteria which are categorized to environment, cost and performance. The environmental criteria are evaluated from a life cycle analysis and the cost criteria from a life cycle costing analysis. Both analyses are performed using the SimaPro software. The performance is assessed in terms of component's mass. The proposed methodology is used to assess the sustainability of novel composite liquid hydrogen storage tanks. Six different tank options are assessed; they differ in terms of the inner tank material (Aluminium-2219T8, PEI 20% CF, Stainless Steel AISI316). For the specific application, the criteria weights are derived using six different objective weighting methods. All weighting methods have resulted to the same most sustainable option but differ in the other options ranking, which highlights the importance of the criteria weights. A variation analysis conducted on the effects of the weights has revealed the criteria with the lowest and the highest significances and the highest uncertainty. The proposed methodology can be applied to any aircraft component, provided that the data required are available.