MAEM-RO · Methodologies and applications of emission measurements on rotorcraft

The air transport industry is paying a lot of attention to growing public concern on the environmental issues of air pollution. Clean Sky is a Joint Technology Initiative that will develop breakthrough technologies to reduce environmental impact. In order to reduce environmental impact from rotorcraft, the Green Rotorcraft integrated technology demonstrator will develop environment-friendly flight paths: they are procedures and mission profiles designed to reduce fuel consumption and NOx emissions. To this aim it is necessary to create a data base containing flue emissions by rotorcraft during flight and in different weather conditions. This data base will be used in order to design green mission profiles; to create complete database, generic rotorcraft will be mathematically modelled to calculate flue gas emissions, by means of state of art numerical codes. Results from numerical codes always need to be validated by extensive test campaign. In this proposal Centro Combustione Ambiente (CCA) proposes as a partner for flue gas emission measurement. In order to perform accurate measurement activity in a not standardized field, CCA will use its broad experience in flue gas measurements from stationary gas turbines. Due to the lack of standard procedures to perform measurements on rotorcraft, CCA will define the most appropriate methodology and the best practices for the measurements of emissions from aeronautical engines. The equipment defined in the methodology will be suitable to operate properly in flight tests. The guidelines from methodology will drive during test campaign to perform accurate measurements of CO, CO2, NOx, SO2 and soot concentration during flight tests. Using data gathered during flight tests, CCA experts will contribute to edit a report with data related to the environmental flight conditions to be used in the optimisation process of flight paths. The final goal is to participate to reduce environmental impact from one of the human activities.