Seminars

There is broad consensus that by the year 2050, the aviation sector will, in some aspects, resemble that of today, but in many ways will need to be fundamentally transformed. By then, aviation is projected to emit approximately 325 million tonnes of CO₂, roughly one third of its 2019 level. Achieving this ambitious goal of decarbonizing a hard-to-abate sector will require coordinated efforts across aircraft technology, operations, sustainable fuels, and out-of-sector abatement. The focus here will be on both evolutionary and transformative aircraft technologies spanning aircraft aerodynamics and the optimization of the underlying structure. The potential for evolutionary improvements to the current generation of aircraft will be discussed in terms of conservative modifications to the wing. In addition, the role of design problem formulation in addressing challenges associated with stability and increased wetted-area penalties often encountered in transformative LH₂-powered configurations will be examined. The existence of these design enablers will be established using interior-point optimization methods, with satisfaction of first-order optimality conditions providing a certificate of optimality. Transformative technologies will be enabled by equally transformative structures. A large-scale topology optimization framework will be presented that synthesizes integrated, load-bearing structures with the potential to identify dominant load paths in next-generation aircraft and reduce structural weight early in the design process. Finally, a multi-fidelity modeling framework will be introduced that links CFD-based, multi-point shape optimization with system-level estimates of CO₂ emissions for short-, medium-, and long-haul commercial aircraft. By explicitly connecting high-fidelity aerodynamic design decisions to fleet-scale environmental outcomes, this framework will establish a connection between second-order aircraft performance attributes to flight operations.