In what could revolutionise commercial aviation, scientists claim to have designed a green plane which is estimated to use 70 per cent less fuel than the current aircraft and reduce noise and nitrogen oxide emission.
A team at Massachusetts Institute of Technology has come up with the design which it has presented to Nasa as part of $2.1 million research deal to develop environmental and performance concepts which would guide the US space agency’s aeronautics research over the next 25 years.
The MIT team, in fact, developed two designs — the 180-passenger D “double bubble” series to replace the Boeing 737 class aircraft, currently used for domestic flights, and the 350 passenger H “hybrid wing body” series to replace the 777 class aircraft currently used for international flights. The engineers conceived of the D series by reconfiguring the tube-and-wing structure.
Instead of using a single fuselage cylinder, they used two partial cylinders placed side by side to create a wider structure whose cross-section resembles two soap bubbles joined together.
They also moved the engines from the usual wing- mounted locations to the rear of the fuselage. Unlike engines on most transport aircraft that take in the high-speed, undisturbed air flow, the D-series engines take in slower moving air that is present in the wake of the fuselage.
Known as the Boundary Layer Ingestion (BLI), this technique allows the engines to use less fuel for the same amount of thrust, although the design has several practical drawbacks, such as creating more engine stress.
According to Mark Drela, the lead designer of the Dseries, the design mitigates some of the drawbacks of the BLI technique by travelling about 10 per cent slower than a 737.
To further reduce the drag and amount of fuel that the plane burns, the D series features longer, skinnier wings and a smaller tail.