TriMech Enterprise
Thought Leadership Interview - Challenges in Aerospace - Rajkaran Singh, Dassault Systèmes
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This industry is critical to the UK economy. It's worth well over 8 billion and it supports employment of over 110,000 people across the wider economy. The disruptions that are going to come with this technology are also going to affect this economy and what we want to do is we want to remain industry leaders in this space and we want to ride the wave, if you will. When we look at how we are going to achieve significant reduction in carbon emissions, achievement of our decarbonization targets and the route towards sustainable aviation that is paved with challenges breaking these challenges down. One of the ways in which we can achieve this is through an entire fleet overhaul introducing new concepts of aircraft into the fleet. This is going to need quicker verification, quicker certification, so virtual validation, digital certification and quicker approvals of these technologies to enter the fleet given the targets that we have in order to achieve the sustainable aviation targets and decarbonization goals. We're going to have to divide the aircraft spectrum into broadly 3 parts by mission specificity. Firstly, for short haul missions, the aircraft will most likely become fully electric because the gravimetric battery density supports the thresholds that they need to reach. Next category the larger, medium and long haul aircraft are going to face gravimetric and volumetric challenges based on power ranges and based on the range that they need to achieve and the weights that they need to carry. So they will most likely gravitate towards sustainable aviation fuels or SAFs hybrid electric propulsion or even hydrogen. And finally, in between these two extremes of the smaller aircraft and the long range aircraft will be the narrowbody or the middle of market where hydrogen is going to compete with the hybrid electric option. The entire spectrum of aircraft that we have discussed are going to face very similar challenges across the spectrum. The first one is going to be aircraft technology engine redesign. The second one is going to be around hydrogen cost and sustainable hydrogen production. And the third and fourth challenges are going to be specifically around infrastructure development and the costs associated with putting the new infrastructure in place to support the entire ecosystem that's needed to deliver these new technologies in order to achieve our goals.