By Aimee Turner at Farnborough
Manufacturers have taken the first step towards making aerospace greener
Europe's €1.6 billion ($2 billion) bid to speed up the entry into service of greener aircraft received a boost at Farnborough when seven manufacturers signed up to lay the groundwork for the ambitious Clean Sky joint technology initiative (JTI).
Airbus, Dassault Aviation, Eurocopter, Liebherr-Aerospace Lindenberg, Rolls-Royce, Safran, and Thales have all made an initial commitment to the seven-year programme under the Seventh research framework programme (FP7), half of which is to be funded by the European Commission. All now depends on the EC clearing the numerous hurdles within the complex European machinery to give these efforts to create the innovative aircraft configurations of the future the best political send-off.
The Clean Sky initiative aims to demonstrate and validate future technology designed to meet ambitious long-term goals of radically cutting noise and reducing carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide emissions, as set by the Advisory Council for Aeronautics Research in Europe (ACARE). Aware of how radical those cuts need to be, ACARE has made it clear that any workable outcomes must use substantial levels of innovation allied with the development of breakthrough technologies.
Essentially, the Clean Sky JTI on aeronautics and air transport is designed to allow partners to assess, design, build and test technology validation vehicles.
Aerospace and Defence Industries Association of Europe (ASD) secretary general Francois Gayet said earlier this year that these vehicles will become essential if industry shareholders are to be convinced to commit to more radical, greener products sooner. "Clean Sky is necessary to overcome this [current] market failure," he said.
Efforts will be co-ordinated to meet programme milestones and divided into six platforms, each led by an integrator to ensure delivery of the integrated test vehicles. A technology evaluator platform will be launched to ensure efforts are efficiently focused towards the high-level objectives.
Excitement for the JTI is clearly there, especially among the likely integrators who will manage their respective Clean Sky commitment in much the same way as an industrial programme.
Speaking at the fifth Aeronautic Days event in Vienna, Rolls-Royce director of research and technology Ric Parker cited the targeted 12% small and medium-size enterprise (SME) collaboration as only one aspect that makes the JTI so compelling: "Under FP7, SMEs are being encouraged to participate directly rather than simply as subcontractors under previous research framework programmes.
One step beyond
"But it doesn't stop there. The exciting part really is the sheer scale of it. With previous engine development programmes - the Silencer and the Efficient and Environmentally-Friendly Aero Engine [EEFAE] programmes - we only took the technology to an engine demonstration level. We did not aim to integrate it at aircraft level.
"The JTI is a win-win scenario on three levels: first, there is more of a focus on actually pulling the technology through. Secondly, it integrates at the point where the supply chain is actively involved; and thirdly, because it is being led by industry, it gives us more flexibility. In an environment in which we don't know what future aircraft programmes are going to be, we will for once be able to match actual market demand."
Speaking at the Farnborough air show, Airbus vice-president research and technology Dieter Schmitt said the project, uniquely designed to reach the proof-of-concept stage in areas yet to be researched, would additionally enable commercial companies to "think further ahead" and carry out riskier projects than would be normally fiscally viable.
All of which should be music to the EC's ears. Zoran Stancic, deputy director general for EC research, earlier this year reminded delegates that the Commission's mandate to increase aeronautic research should be placed in the broader political context of the 2000 Lisbon Summit. Europe's heads of states and governments, aware of the need for an innovative, high-tech Europe, agreed that the percentage of the gross national product spent for research and development in the EU needed to be raised to 3%.
And yet those ambitious targets were severely tested when the €73 billion budget pitched for in April by the EC to fund FP7, the latest in the multi-annual framework programmes that have for more than 20 years been bringing together industry and the research community, came under fire when the European Union's 25 member states and the European Parliament whittled that down to around €54 billion.
"Despite the fact that the agreed budget is lower than the EC's original ambitions, it is still a significant increase per annum compared to FP6," said Stancic.
If everything goes to schedule and the European Council and Parliament make their final decisions in November, the EC could be able to publish the first calls for proposals about one month after this. "This could be feasible before the end of 2006 - or at latest by early 2007," said Stancic.
Bureaucratic issues
There are other issues, essentially of a bureaucratic nature. According to recent EC presentations, there are six possible joint technology initiatives on the starting blocks, but not all of them are guaranteed to start at the same time.
As far as the aeronautics JTI is concerned, the EC is busy preparing a solid information case on the technical content to present before the European Parliament and Council of Ministers, including legal and financial corporate governance aspects such as intellectual property right protection and budget management. The EC also wants to launch a full independent value assessment of the JTI, so needs to put that out to tender if it is to get the rules and procedures clarified by early next year.
Things are happening, however. Already EC regulators have approved the allocation of €67 million in public funding to support a UK R&D project led by Rolls-Royce to develop more environmentally efficient engines under a national aerospace strategy.
This will see industrial partners such as Rolls-Royce, Bombardier, HS Marston, Smiths and Goodrich and the universities of Belfast, Birmingham, Cambridge, Oxford and Sheffield link in their own bid to meet the same avowed ACARE goals.
Airbus's Schmitt adds that the JTI will in much the same way have the effect of leveraging the capabilities of research agencies and universities in tandem with private sector expertise. "We find this has a multiplier effect on what the aerospace industry can do," he says. ■
Source: Flight International