Advanced technologies for the efficient and climate-neutral aircraft of tomorrow
Our research activities in the Transport Aircraft department focus on advanced flight physic technologies and their integration in order to push efficiency limits and to minimize the environmental impact of aircraft.
Competencies
Key competence areas are wing and overall aircraft design, drag reduction, integration of advanced propulsion systems, and design of multifunctional flap systems for high lift, load alleviation, and flight control. Drag reduction addresses natural and hybrid laminar flow control supported by in-depth shape and design knowledge for the development and integration of HLFC suction systems. We expand our profound understanding of the integration of ducted and unducted engines towards the integration of novel propulsion systems to elaborate optimized installation solutions featuring distributed and hybrid-electric propulsion and boundary layer ingestion. We further mature active flow control technologies to advance separation control on high-lift devices, moveables, vertical tail planes, and for novel integration strategies of propulsion systems. Especially efficient high aspect ratios wings are subject of strong aeroelastic interactions. Therefore, we design and optimize configurations and aircraft components, such as winglets, and in a fully multidisciplinary approach while considering real world aircraft constraints. For this purpose, we apply in-house analysis methods and contribute to the development of advanced robust single- and multidisciplinary design and optimization tools. To validate and demonstrate novel technologies and configurations, we utilize wind tunnel facilities and DLR’s flight test aircraft supported by DLR measurement systems development.
Research topics