Accurately predicting the fuel burn performance and CO_2 emissions of future aircraft is of fundamental importance when setting efficiency goals and standards for commercial aviation. Over the next 10-20 years, improvements in fuel burn performance will largely result from aerodynamic, structural, and propulsive technologies whose true capabilities at the time of technology insertion can only be predicted with some level of uncertainty. In addition, significant reductions in fuel burn and CO_2 emissions can be realized by changing the design mission specifications of new aircraft, such as design range, payload, or cruise Mach number. This paper presents our recent work to quantify the potential impact of both improvements in technology and design mission specification changes on aircraft fuel burn. Technology improvements and interactions between those technologies are modeled using a probabilistic framework, and Monte Carlo optimizations and optimization under uncertainty are pursued. These methods enable both the quantification of the uncertainty/variability in the fuel burn metric and the minimization of it. Mission specification changes are studied in a deterministic optimization framework, and results on the potential of such changes are presented together with sensitivities of the performance with respect to all mission and technology factors. The results show that, with use of conceptual-level analysis and design techniques, the uncertainties in the future performance and emissions of commercial aircraft can be quantified and managed.
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