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SUSTAINABILITY ASSESSMENT OF COMPOSITES IN AERO-ENGINE COMPONENTS

Part of: Socio-technical Issues in Design

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 June 2020

P. L. Y. Léonard  and
J. W. Nylander
P. L. Y. Léonard*
Affiliation:
GKN Aerospace, Sweden
J. W. Nylander
Affiliation:
GKN Aerospace, Sweden
*
*pauline.leonard@gknaerospace.com

Abstract

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Environmental issues such as climate change are leading to sustainability challenges for the aerospace industry. New materials such as composites allow significant weight reduction, which leads to a lower fuel consumption. However, composites involve complex processes and there is a lack of knowledge on their social and environmental consequences. Through two cases based on real aero-engines components, this paper shows that the weight savings provided by composites reduce significantly the CO2 emissions during flight which compensates the environmental drawbacks from production and recycling.

Keywords

sustainabilitylife cycle assessment (LCA)lightweight designcompositeaerospace
Type
Article
Information
Proceedings of the Design Society: DESIGN Conference , Volume 1 , May 2020 , pp. 1989 - 1998
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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