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Mavris and ASDL team collaborate on efficient wing design

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A three-year, $875,000 collaboration between Georgia Tech’s Aerospace Systems Design Laboratory (ASDL), Virginia Tech, General Electric, and Boeing is seeking to reduce future airplane fuel consumption by as much as 60 percent.

Headed up at Georgia Tech by AE’s Dr. Dimitri Mavris, the Subsonic Ultra Green Aircraft Research (SUGAR) project has recently grabbed the attention of Aviation Week, which published a story on the project Jan. 27.

The NASA-funded project is focused on designing a truss-braced wing that is not compromised by the weight penalty normally associated with conventional designs. The result is expected to burn substantially less fuel and could be ready for active deployment in an airliner by 2030.

At Tech, Mavris has been working with a team of five professional and seven student researchers to optimize the wing planform and truss geometry for Boeing engineers who are then performing detailed finite element method (FEM) analysis and wind tunnel testing.

The SUGAR project is also assessing the benefits of using hybrid electric propulsion which embeds an electric motor within the engine. This allows the engine’s fan to be electrically powered in flight which results in lower fuel burn.

As something of an added benefit, the SUGAR project prompted ASDL researchers to develop new evaluation tools, which can be used to assess detailed engine performance for a variety of engine architectures. The new suite of hybrid electric modeling elements employs the industry standard Numerical Propulsion Systems Simulation (NPSS) software, and can be used on engine variants involving fuel cells, batteries, and cryogenic components.

“The tools and models we’ve developed on this project are ready to be deployed and used today for a wide variety of unconventional propulsion systems.” explains ASDL researcher Christopher Perullo. “The deployment of a newly designed plane typically takes a lot longer, but we could see this as early as 2030.”

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  • Workflow Status:Published
  • Created By:Britanny Grace
  • Created:07/14/2015
  • Modified By:Fletcher Moore
  • Modified:10/07/2016