The Advisory Council for Aeronautics Research in Europe (ACARE) has set an ambitious array of objectives to be accomplished by 2050 for civil aviation. It is often claimed that complying with those targets will not require evolution but, rather, revolution. If the growth in aviation has to be sustained in the future, then we must come up with radical aircraft and engine configurations which can meet the demands of future aviation. The AHEAD project (co-funded by the European Commission) investigated a novel multi-fuel blended wing body aircraft with a unique propulsion system to address the challenges of the future. The engine for this aircraft uses an embedded hybrid engine exploiting the boundary layer ingestion technique to increase the propulsive efficiency. Two major consequences of BLI are vital in this regard. Namely, loss of total pressure recovery and increased total pressure distortion at the Aerodynamic Interface Plane (AIP) or the engine fan-face. Hence, the inlet performance is measured by the total Pressure Recovery Factor (PRF) and Distortion Coefficient (DC60). The current research work aims to design an embedded inlet on a Blended Wing Body (BWB) aircraft that produces maximum value of PRF and minimum DC60. The aim of this research is to investigate the S-shaped inlet to understand the effect of various geometrical parameters on its performance. The Knowledge Based Engineering platform ParaPy is used to parametrize the S-shaped inlet and generate a variety of inlet geometries and volume meshes. These different variants were analysed using the Ansys® CFD code. @en

Pulsed jet actuators (PJAs) are one of the candidate technologies to be integrated in Fowler flaps to increase the maximum lift coefficient of transport aircraft in the landing configuration. The total system consists of the actuators plus sensors, a piping system to supply pressurized air and a (redundant) power and communication system to provide actuator control. In this paper, it is investigated what increase in the maximum lift coefficient is required to justify the added weight and power off-takes that accompany the integration of pulsed jet actuators. This is done by making an automated design process for the overall aircraft, the piping assembly system, and the electrical wiring interconnection system. These last two sub-systems rely on KBE techniques that automate dimensioning and performance evaluation. A test case is specified that encompasses the design of a typical single-aisle mid-range aircraft with and without the PJA system installed. It is concluded that the introduction of the PJA system requires at least an increase in maximum lift coefficient of 0.2 to justify the increase in system mass and power off-takes. Furthermore, it is shown that if the maximum lift coefficient increases with 0.4, only small reductions in maximum take-off weight (−0.3 %) and operating empty weight (−0.6 %) can be expected, while the total fuel burn remains virtually constant.@en