Enhancing Commercial Airplane Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) with Environmental Impacts of Maintenance and Operations to Reduce Ownership Costs
Open AccessCurrent research studies in commercial aviation’s environmental life cycle analyses (LCA) focus exclusively on fuel burn (e.g., CO2 emissions, particulate emissions) and noise impacts to populated areas. There is no publicly-available, peer-reviewed research regarding other environmental impacts (e.g., energy use, water use, and/or waste disposal). While major Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) like Boeing and Airbus are purported to have such LCA embedded in their design processes, these impacts may not be universally factored into the engineering decision-making process when multiple design options are available.There are over 25,000 commercial airplanes in the worldwide fleet. In 2018, the cost of maintaining this fleet was $75.5B annually, of which roughly 1-3% covered the cost of utilities and waste disposal at the airports and in the maintenance hangars. By reducing or eliminating power requirements, water usage, and/or waste disposal costs by 10%, engineers could reduce airplane ownership costs by at least $75M annually.This research outlines a method to enhance the environmental LCA of commercial airplanes. A process was developed where the design engineer will first identify configuration inputs (e.g., model of airplane, its age, expected global region(s) or country(ies) it will operate until its end of life). The engineer will then identify operations and maintenance impacts (e.g., required power, water, consumables, labor) for each design option under consideration. The process details how to calculate the environmental LCA and total cost impact for each design option, thus enabling design engineers to make improved decisions to minimize environmental impacts and ownership costs.Once built, the tool’s accuracy was validated by comparing a published environ-mental LCA to results provided by the tool with the same inputs. Then two case studies were reviewed and enhanced by applying this environmental LCA methodology to those design decisions. The results validated the two hypotheses postulated. After a brief discussion of the research test conclusions, the paper continues with contributions made to the engineering body of knowledge as well as recommendations for future research. The core result of this paper is that this environmental LCA methodology can not only help commercial aviation design engineers but can also be applied to any product with a long lifecycle that is sold, used, and maintained globally.
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Beauchamp_gwu_0075A_15708.pdf | 2022-03-06 | Open Access |
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