TriMech Enterprise
Thought Leadership Interview - Trends in Aerospace - Rajkaran Singh, Dassault Systèmes
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So sky's the limit for decarbonization in the aviation industry. Pun intended. Dividing the sector into five parts where we look at evtol aircraft, regional aircraft, community aircraft, and we look at the narrow and wide body that we are more used to seeing. We could split this into roughly aircraft that go from a couple of seats to about 100 seats and then 100 seats to about 250 seats and mileage wise anywhere covering 500 to 1000 miles for EVTOL, reasonable commuter aircraft, all the way to 3 to 5000 miles for the narrow and wide body, the entire spectrum across these five types of of categories will be disrupted by electric aviation, by sustainable aviation fuels, by hydrogen technologies, and by hybrid technologies. So another aspect of the future trend is going to be heavy investment in infrastructure for sustainable aviation and the decarbonization of the aerospace industry. To progress, the infrastructure has to match pace with the pace of development and new aircraft design, new engine design, new fuel technologies that we are seeing in the surface. Consider typical of an airport, for example, not only have to figure out the vertical vertical takeoffs and landings, but they've also got to think about the city, the urban hub. Aviation is a very deeply connected industry with with decades old infrastructure that it is being supported by. And the new technologies, the new infrastructure has to seamlessly integrate with the existing technologies and work with the current systems of system. For the UK to be at the forefront of sustainable aviation technologies and the decarbonization of aerospace, We need to work with stakeholders across industry, academia and government to put the right infrastructure, right policies, right thinking and the right people in place to achieve the goals that we've set out for ourselves. The next trend I'd like to mention is around ecosystem and business model evolution. The introduction of these novel technologies is totally revolutionizing the skies above us. They are unlocking new and unheard of routes because the new model of advanced air mobility or AAM, is based on a decentralized aviation network, and it gives access to places that weren't connected to certain grids before. It gives access to certain types of aircraft that weren't in operation before, and also targets new customers, which might not have been potentially able to use the conventional services to keep pace with these rapid innovations and technology development. Everything from design concepts, engineering, prototyping, manufacturing through supply chain sustainment through to the decommissioning of these concepts and the regulations that underlie across this entire ecosystem needs to keep pace with the technological evolution that we're seeing. The aerospace industry is on the verge of one of its most significant disruptions since humans took flight. This industry is critical to the UK economy. It's worked 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're going to achieve significant reduction in carbon emissions, achievement of our decarbonization targets and the road 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 three 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 Rangers 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 would be the narrow body 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.