The Silent Aircraft Initiative
Posted on November 8, 2006 Comments (1)
Silent Aircraft gives young engineers a flight of fancy:
these students are not undergraduates. They are budding young engineers, aged 13 to 18, taking part in a three-month design challenge with Cambridge’s Engineering Department to tackle aircraft noise. Working in teams, the students – from schools and colleges across the country, from Bristol to Sheffield – are doing a project related to the Cambridge-MIT Institute’s Silent Aircraft Initiative. This initiative links researchers at Cambridge and MIT with industrial partners to design a radically quieter passenger plane, and includes research into ways to reduce the noise from the undercarriage – one of the major noise sources on a landing aircraft. So this challenge has tasked these young students to design, and make a model of, a quieter undercarriage.
Related: The Silent Aircraft Initiative – Engineering the Boarding of Airplanes – Flying Luxury Hotel – The birth of a quieter, greener plane
The Silent Aircraft Initiative (SAI) team has succeeded in coming up with a radically quieter plane. Crucially, the SAX-40 is also 35% more fuel-efficient than any airliner currently flying.
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June 18th, 2007 @ 8:17 pm
Rear-mounted “open-rotor” engines offer unrivalled environmental performance for short-haul flying due to their higher propulsive efficiency. However, there are significant difficulties in fixing such a large engine under a wing of a narrow-body aircraft, making rear-mounting of the engines the optimum solution.