Assessing the Environmental Impact of Aircraft/Engine Integration With Respect to Contrails

Abstract

In recent years, the radiative forcing of aircraft contrails and aircraft-induced contrail cirrus have been highlighted as a serious short-term climate impact of the aviation industry. Greater understanding of factors influencing contrail properties are required if routes to mitigation are to be explored. In this work, a parametric turbofan powered aircraft model has been created to study the impact that aircraft design, in particular the interaction between the jet and wingtip vortex, can have on ice crystal formation, growth, and dynamics within a contrail. To investigate this, a contrail microphysics module has been developed and integrated within Rolls-Royce in-house Hydra computational fluid dynamics code. Three-dimensional Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes simulations are conducted over the jet and early vortex regime, covering an area which is often simplified in most contrail modeling approaches. It is found that the position of the engine along the wing of an aircraft can impact the formation of the wingtip vortex, altering the contrail properties and distribution downstream of the aircraft. The effect of multi-engine architecture is also assessed and shown to influence the magnitude of exhaust entrainment into the vortex.