Like just most other forms of transportation, aircraft are helping to heat up the planet. In fact, air travel accounts for 12 percent of transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. And that number is predicted to go up.

That’s why Dr. David Zingg, director of the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies (UTIAS), is out to literally reshape the airplane. “The current layout—a tube with wings—has been around for 50 years,” he says. “It’s so fully developed that it has limited room for improvement. But new designs with lower drag would help produce lower emissions.”

Aircraft design used to involve long hours in the wind tunnel and lots of trial and error at the drawing board. Today, wind tunnel testing is still important at a later stage, but advanced computer modeling has revolutionized every step of the process. In fact, computers do a lot of the actual design work themselves—guided by sophisticated software rules or “algorithms.”

Once those rules are defined, designers can specify objectives and constraints for a particular project, as well as some basic parameters—then step back and let the computer go to work. “Using the algorithms,” explains Dr. Zingg, “the computer searches intelligently through possible designs to find the one that satisfies all the constraints and maximizes the objectives.”

It may sound easy, but developing those rules is a complex, mathematically intense process. It takes an incredible amount of talent and experience to endow long strings of 1s and 0s with the ability to design something. In Dr. Zingg’s case, that talent and experience is focused on writing algorithms that maximize how easily air will flow over the surfaces of a proposed plane. The more “slippery” the aircraft, the less fuel it will use and the fewer emissions it will produce. Other scientists at UTIAS are looking at gas flows inside jet engines, creating their own algorithms to guide the design of a new generation of quieter, more efficient propulsion systems. All of this software development demands heavy-duty hardware; the high-powered computers used by Dr. Zingg and his UTIAS colleagues have been funded in part by the Ontario Innovation Trust.

As important as silicon has become, however, the human element is far from gone in the search for more environmentally friendly aircraft. “We’re a long way from having algorithms that let you press a button to produce the perfect airplane,” says Dr. Zingg. “Usually we have to guide the process. We have to say things like ‘give me the perfect blended wing body.’ Even formulating the problem is complicated, because there are always a lot of competing objectives and many, many constraints.
“But that’s where the fun comes in.”

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