Runway shape optimization for reducing airport environmental impact and increasing aircraft productivity

Elham, Ali and Curran, Richard (2014) Runway shape optimization for reducing airport environmental impact and increasing aircraft productivity. In AIAA Aviation Forum 2014 : AIAA/3AF Aircraft Noise and Emissions Reduction Symposium. American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.. (doi:10.2514/6.2014-3020).

Abstract

This paper presents the concept and advantages of vertically curved runways for reducing the air pollution in the vicinity of airports, while also increasing the productivity of passenger aircraft.
The shape of a curved runway was optimize to minimize the produced CO₂ during an aircraft take-off and also to maximize the aircraft take-off weight for a given runway horizontal length. A method for aircraft take-off simulation is presented and validated using actual data of a passenger aircraft. Using that method a seried of single objectiveas well as multi-objective optimizations was performed to find the optimum runway shape for different objectives: minimizing the produced CO₂ during take-off, maximizing the aircraft take-off weight and minimizing the runway construction cost, while achieving the first two objectives. The results of the oprimizations showed that for a Boeing 747-400 class aircraft about 250kg reduction in the produced CO₂ during a take-off can be achieved using a curved runway with a height of 60m and the length of 3km. On the other hand, the range of a similar aircraft can be increased by 2500km using a curved runway with the same height and length comparing to a flat runway with the same horizontal length.

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