TriMech Enterprise
Thought Leadership Interview - Decarbonization in Aerospace - Rajkaran Singh, Dassault Systèmes
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The aerospace industry is on the verge of disruption never seen before, since the time when humans took flight. And I don't say that lightly. When we look at the new concepts that are coming in, we've been talking about blended wings for many, many years now. But we will look at a new concept coming in to tackle sustainable aviation that it's really revolutionary and it's truly mind blowing to see where the industry is headed. Sustainable aviation and decarbonization in aviation is not a matter of if anymore, it's a matter of how and when. And the industry is really rallying together with some new innovative concepts and never seen before ideas to achieve some of those targets. Now, the road to get there is not easy because we have the 2050 targets, the Paris Agreement, the a care 2050 goals, and we have some really big milestones to hit. The only way to achieve them is going to be through disruptive technologies and rapid innovation. When we look at what we need to do to get there, we feel digitalization is one of the answers and is one of the enablers to help us achieve those goals. There is risk. So what's driving the race to colonization? So decarbonization is on the agenda of every executive in the aerospace industry. We've all lived through the pandemic and we've seen the systemic and structural changes to the aerospace industry caused by COVID 19. And what we see going forward is a very clear challenge of the ecosystem around sustainable aviation. So this is not only just going to be around aircraft design or sustainable aviation fuels or infrastructure. It's going to be a combination of all of those things to build the end to end ecosystem, to support sustainable aviation and decarbonization. The key question the industry needs to solve is how, how do we decarbonize? And for us, the view is through digitalization. This is an ecosystem challenge. It's a systems of systems problem which the industry needs to come together to solve. There's no easy answer. It's no silver bullet because there isn't a single technology that exists to help help us achieve the goals that we need to achieve. In a joint white paper with Dassault Systems, ADS and Roland Berger, we looked at multiple roadmaps and multiple levers. The key four that stand out, which I'd like to highlight, are technology and infrastructure improvements. We talked about new fuels, sustainable aviation fuels. We looked at electric. We looked at hydrogen aircraft. We also looked at market based measures all offsetting. So it doesn't matter which path you take. And there's many different roadmaps to achieve decarbonization through digitalization. But the key element across all of this that was common was that the technologies of virtual twin technologies to enable collaboration across different parts of the industry and looking at the entire end to end lifecycle of the complex systems and products is going to be the key to achieve the results that we need to achieve. We have some very exciting trends coming up in the aerospace industry. The new conventional aircraft of the future are going to look extremely different from the aircraft that we are visually used to seeing. The new propulsion concepts, be it electric hybrid hydrogen, are going to change the face of aviation as we know it. And these exciting technologies, many of them we've we've been talking about for many years, we've heard about blended wing body concepts. We've heard about transonic thrust based wings, etc.. But we're going to see more of these technologies come to the surface. We're looking at the biggest shift in aviation technology since Frank Frankfurters is original jet engine, and this is aimed towards sustainable aviation concepts, towards the decarbonization of aerospace. And it's a really exciting time for the industry.