Innovative Environmental Control System for Aircraft

The aviation sector is responsible for about 3% of EU’s total greenhouse gas emissions and more than 2% of global emissions [1] and is expected to grow by 45-50% from 2016 to 2036 with a consequent significant growth of emissions [2]. This growth, together with the EU’s climate and energy objectives, requires to address aviation’s environmental impact. In this context, the European Union has launched the Clean Sky 2 program that aims to develop innovative, cutting-edge technology aimed at reducing gas emissions and noise levels produced by aircraft [3]. This challenging objective can be achieved by performing optimization studies at aircraft system and sub-system levels. The Environmental Control System (ECS), that provides conditioned air to the cabin crew and passengers, is the most energy demanding sub-system of an aircraft, being responsible for up to 5% of the total fuel burn consumption of the engines. This energy consumption is mostly required by the ECS to compress the outside air. In such a context, among the Clean Sky 2 initiatives, the Adaptive Environmental Control System (aECS) project aims to minimize the amount of compressed air required to pressurize and cool the cabin with a reduction of aircraft fuel burn up to 2% over traditional ECS. While a reduction of the ECS energy consumption is possible by reducing the amount of outside air, on the other hand, the reduction of outside air will result in a less effective cabin contaminant reduction via dilution with fresh air. Therefore, the integration of filtration and sensing technologies is the key to guarantee that the cabin air quality level is not compromised with the innovative aECS. This paper introduces a novel ECS architecture and provides an overview of the sensing and filtration technologies needed to achieve sizeable fuel burn reduction whilst maintaining traditional cabin air quality.