Xin Zhao, Division of Fluid Dynamics, gives his docent lecture

Assessing butterfly effect in aviation: challenges and dilemmas

The development of advanced aircraft technologies, operation strategies, infrastructures and policies are key drivers for achieving sustainable aviation in the future. To envision the path towards sustainable aviation, comprehensive studies are needed to integrate these elements and paint the complete picture.

When assessing the butterfly effect of small changes of basic components within large-scale research, challenges often arise due to knowledge gaps between diverse disciplines and the significant effort required to adapt multi-scale and multi-fidelity sources of information. Additionally, dilemmas frequently occur when different outcomes are observed across various disciplines due to changes in one or multiple components. Typical trade-off issues can be seen when considering noise, CO2 and NOx emissions simultaneously in turbofan design. Measuring and comparing different outcomes under the same standard is critical in determining trade-off weights.

However, we must question whether the cold numbers calculated in our paper truly represent the full story. Humans, as designers, operators and receivers of all, introduce the greatest uncertainty. Based on the experience in developing physics-based models of the basic air transport components for supporting large-scale air traffic research, I will present the challenges and dilemmas arising from multidisciplinary research and discussing the way forward.