Methodology for Analyzing Competing Options for Air Management Systems at the Stage of Conceptual Design of Civil Aircraft's Complex of Onboard Systems
Analysis of competing options for the implementation of the system is a key task at the stage of conceptual design of aviation air conditioning systems as these systems have a great impact on the fuel efficiency of the entire aircraft. The decision about choice of competing options regarding not only the appearance of the system, but also a lot of different parameters including technical, technological and so on. In case of conceptual design missing parameters for a complex criterion can be replaced by an alternative risk level estimate. This article shows an example how to compare competing variants of the air management system at the stage of conceptual design and provides a methodology for selecting the key parameters of the comparison criterion. As a result, it is shown that vapor cycle cooling is more promising due to the wide possibilities of reducing the mass of components and increasing the overall cooling efficiency. For the air cycle, most of the possible solutions to increase efficiency have already been implemented now.