Within the European funded research project CleanSky 2 ECHO (Evaluation of a Certified HLFC Elevator Operation), a Hybrid Laminar Flow Control (HLFC) system for a long range aircraft’s Horizontal Tail Plane (HTP) is developed, which is to be evaluated for flight tests. The project starts in July 2015 and ends after nine years in June 2024.
The HLFC technology is to be integrated on a HTP of a target commercial aircraft for long haul in-service flights. Objective is to increase the performance of commercial aircraft. The main aspect is to reduce the drag during cruise and thus reducing the fuel consumption, which in effect will increase the range of the aircraft. The challenge is to achieve an elevator equipped with an HLFC system without a large increase in complexity or cost of the elevator. One major issue to be investigated is the realization of suitable system concepts to fulfil functional and performance requirements with minimum impact on weight and power consumption. Therefore, process, methods and assessment tools for HLFC systems are developed and evaluated.
In the first step, a multidisciplinary process and suitable tools for the system design are implemented to achieve the involvement of various disciplines in an optimized workflow. With regard to the assessment objectives appropriate evaluation methods and tools are developed and implemented. Appropriate components are defined for the system design and suitable system architectures for HLFC are developed and evaluated. The assessment criteria include the necessary degree of redundancy to fulfil the safety and reliability requirements, system behaviour with consideration of failure cases, system weight and energy consumption. Main contents of this study are: