Abstract
Due to the enormous growth of the commercial aviation sector over its short history, the sustainability of the sector has received significant attention in recent years. In this respect, airframe manufacturers need to have a good understanding of the life cycle impacts of their products to fully address stakeholder expectations. The objective of the research is to explore the scope for environmental considerations to be effectively integrated in the aircraft design process to ensure optimisation of product environmental life cycle impacts and satisfaction of stakeholder requirements. The project focusses on the adaptation of the life cycle concept through a design for environment approach to a complex product, developed over 10 years and for which operational life can span up to 40 years. In this respect, the potential for life cycle assessment tools to support decision-making in airframe design constitute the innovative aspect of this research. The framework developed in this project is based on empirical data, theoretical reviews and suggestions illustrated by case studies, validated with further empirical work. Despite the traditional and relatively conservative approach to design in the aerospace industry, there are positive and encouraging signs suggesting that DfE can successfully be implemented in the organisation surveyed, which can also be applicable in other companies with a strong engineering focus. By characterising the decision-making framework in airframe design, and evaluating designers’ needs in terms of environmental information, the benefits of integrating customised life cycle assessment tools in certain cases have been demonstrated, for example when selecting airframe materials and fabrication processes. The suitability, during definition of aircraft basic configuration, of other types of tools, such as indicators for key operational parameters (fuel burn or noise) and their associated impacts on main environmental categories, was also argued, since the application of LCA tools to the whole aircraft would not be feasible due to the lack of detailed data for other life cycle stages.