NASA awarded a $2.9 million contract to Aurora Flight Sciences for continued work on the D8 aircraft, a candidate for the agency’s X-plane program that is designed to demonstrate technologies that could result in well over 50 percent efficiency gains in commercial aircraft.
NASA earlier this year announced ambitious plans to resurrect its X-plane program in its quest to research advanced aeronautics. NASA Administrator Dan Bolden estimated the program would involve five X-planes over the next decade that will flight-test new technologies and systems as well as novel aircraft and engine configurations. The first of those planes to participate, X-57 or “Maxwell,” is a general aviation-size aircraft that will test new propulsion technologies and efficiencies for private aircraft.
The D8 design, already selected for the FAA’s Continuous Lower Energy, Emissions and Noise Program (CLEEN II) study, targets efficiencies for commercial aircraft. The D8 evolved from NASA’s N+3 program that involved a 2009 contract award to an Aurora, MIT and Pratt & Whitney team to study advancements in transport-class aircraft.
The aircraft, named after its chief designer Mark Drela, incorporates composite manufacturing technologies in a twin-aisle, “double-bubble” wider fuselage, smaller wings and high-bypass engines integrated in the aft fuselage. The design is intended to leverage added efficiency in boundary layer ingestion, resulting in up to 71 percent lower fuel burn than a single-aisle Boeing 737-800, along with a correspondingly reduced noise footprint and emissions.
The test articles built under the CLEEN II program are the same scale as the planned X-plane, providing a “building block” basis for a flight demonstrator, said Aurora.