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Academic staff and postgraduate students from Cranfield University are joining the ‘Silent’ Aircraft Initiative this autumn. They will be contributing to an ambitious initiative to design a plane that is radically quieter than current passenger aircraft.
On the day of its major annual competitiveness summit in Edinburgh, the Cambridge-MIT Institute is delighted to announce that academic staff and postgraduate students from Cranfield University are joining their ‘Silent’ Aircraft Initiative this autumn. They will be contributing to an ambitious initiative to design a plane that is radically quieter than current passenger aircraft.
Cranfield is the latest in an extended ‘Knowledge Integration Community’ of partners involved in this three-year project. The work unites research teams from Cambridge University and MIT with aerospace manufacturers, airport operators and regulators and air traffic controllers in tackling the problem of aircraft noise. The Community’s goal is to produce a credible conceptual design for an aircraft whose noise would be almost imperceptible to the people living around airports.
Professor Riti Singh, Head of the Department of Power, Propulsion and Aerospace Engineering at Cranfield, says he and his colleagues became interested in joining the ‘Silent’ Aircraft project because they felt their skills could complement those of the research teams at Cambridge and MIT.
“At Cranfield, we often end up researching the whole of the aircraft, or the whole of the engine, whereas typically, university research focuses on one individual component or process.”
He adds, “We are also experienced in designing unusual aircraft and taking them to the level of preliminary design. We were, for example, one of the partners in a recent EU-funded project to design a ‘Cryoplane’, a passenger aircraft that would burn liquid hydrogen. Because this has to be kept at extremely low temperatures, the shape of the fuel tanks required would not suit the shape of a conventional aircraft, so we did some research into kind of airframe required, and where the fuel — and indeed the passengers — would go.”
Professor Singh estimates that Cranfield has to date devoted around 150 man years to research into the innovative, blended-wing-body concept aircraft. This ‘flying wing’ configuration is also being taken as the starting point for designs for the ‘Silent’ Aircraft
“However, this will change considerably as we work on tackling key issues such as designing an embedded propulsion system, a low-noise undercarriage system and ways of creating drag and high-lift quietly as the aircraft approaches the airport,” says Prof. Karen Willcox from MIT, who is leading the Initiative’s integration research. “Another major challenge is finding accurate models for predicting the performance of an aircraft with such unconventional configurations,” she says. “These currently don’t exist, and this is an area where we hope that Cranfield will contribute.”
Professor Singh is using part of a ‘platform grant’ from the EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) to help fund Cranfield’s collaboration in the project. As part of that, doctoral students and three members of academic staff (Prof. Singh and Profs. John Fielding and Pericles Pilidis) will be joining the research work on airframe, and engine, design.
“It is a very interesting area of engineering research, and we are looking forward to having an input into it,” says Prof Singh.
Prof. Ann Dowling from Cambridge University’s Engineering Department, who leads the ‘Silent’ Aircraft research at Cambridge, says:
“The radical noise reduction being pursued in the ‘Silent’ Aircraft Initiative requires a major rethink of aircraft design, with the engines and airframe much more closely coupled than in a conventional aircraft. We are delighted to be collaborating with Cranfield University, which has a track record of innovation in aircraft design”.
Examples of knowledge exchange, like the CMI ‘Silent’ Aircraft Knowledge Integration Community, are being discussed today (Tues 30 November) at CMI’s National Competitiveness Summit in Edinburgh. Prof. Michael Kelly, CMI’s Executive Director at Cambridge, says:
“We hope that this type of alliance becomes a model for other CMI projects, enabling us to disseminate both new models of knowledge sharing, and the lessons we are learning from them.”