An Impact Assessment of Degrading Elements on the Overall Benefit of Aircraft with Hybrid Laminar Flow Control

The application of Hybrid Laminar Flow Control (HLFC) on transport aircraft is one of many promising fuel reduction technologies. Even though research and development around this topic is ongoing for some decades, HLFC has not been commercially deployed yet. One major factor is the insecurity of operators regarding the overall efficiency, especially due to the additional maintenance of the system and its components or the laminar effectivity under realistic operational conditions. In this study, we provide a quantification of the impact of several critical elements on the economic benefit of aircraft with HLFC throughout the lifecycle. These are additional line and base maintenance, degreadation due to cloud encounter and insect contamination as well as an increased aircraft price. The influence of each element is thoroughly analyzed and discussed. Results show that the overall economic benefit is significantly less sensitive towards variations of additional maintenance than towards different insect contamination and cloud encounter degradation scenarios. The highest sensitivity was found when varying the aircraft price of the HLFC aircraft. A final combined impact analysis revealed that under the realistic assumptions made in this study for all critical elements, the HLFC aircraft is still economically superior to its conventional turbulent counterpart