Clean Sky Technology Evaluator – Noise assessment and experience at airport level

Clean Sky is a Joint Technology Initiative that aims to develop and mature breakthrough ‘clean technologies’ for air transport. The Clean Sky goal is to identify, develop and validate key technologies necessary to achieve major steps towards ACARE Environmental Goals for 2020. Cross-positioned within the Clean Sky Programme the Technology Evaluator (TE) is a dedicated evaluation platform. It has the key role of assessing the environmental impact of the technologies developed in Clean Sky and their level of success towards the ACARE goals. TE assessments consider all promising green technologies selected by ITDs (Integrated Technology Demonstrators in which these technologies are developed), not on a unitary basis, but grouped as clusters, identifying optimised new aircraft solutions named Concept Aircraft. The approach in TE is to ‘insert’ Concept Aircraft into a number of evaluation scenarios. These Concept Aircraft are ‘flown’ (i.e. simulation scenarios are run) and their environmental performance is compared to that of Reference Technology Aircraft. Such comparisons or assessments are performed at three levels: Mission Level (single aircraft flight), Airport Level (relevant airports to evaluate community impact), and Air Transport System Level (global air transport system, evaluating global fleet and worldwide assumptions). Hence the TE approach aims to demonstrate the impact of Clean Sky output in the overall air transport system. The presentation will focus on the TE Airport Level. For this level, a dedicated tool suite is developed to efficiently evaluate the Clean Sky environmental benefits, which is part of an overarching TE Information System. This tool suite links state-of-the-art airport models for simulating air traffic and assessing environmental impacts as well as aircraft models developed specifically by ITDs to represent the environmental performance of their Concept and Reference Technology Aircraft. On top it includes display facilities to graphically present the (environmental) differences between scenarios (in this case between a scenario without and with aircraft equipped with Clean Sky technologies in the fleet). In addition to this tool suite, TE Airport Level initiated activities to exploit VCNS (Virtual Community Noise Simulator) for potential dissemination purposes: VCNS enables people to experience the sound and visuals of aircraft flyovers in a virtual reality environment. With the efforts now under way and the assessment results emerging, the TE airport-level tool suite is demonstrating to be a powerful facility, which, together with VCNS, provides clear opportunities for airport assessments beyond the scope of Clean Sky TE.