Exergy Analysis Applied to a Complete Flight Mission of Commercial Aircraft

Abstract

†‡ § The aeronautical industry has evolved to design extremely complex aircraft, with highl y integrated systems. Commonly used methods to design and later optimize are based on trade -off studies, which are faulty in evaluating new systems, as they present lack of information. Previous work s have shown the applicability of exergy analysis as a de cision making tool to aircraft systems design and optimization. Besides locating and quantifying the sources of entropy generation, exergy analysis can relate these irreversibities with fuel consumption, and thus with operational cost of a mission. Followi ng the methodology developed in recent works, this paper presents an exergy analysis of a complete flight mission of a conventional commercial aircraft. Such analysis allows the evaluation of exergy efficiency and exergy destroyed rate for the whole flight , as well as for each one of the flight phases (climbing, cruise, descent, holding and landing).