Preliminary design and performance analysis of a box-wing transport aircraft

The paper aims to present the design phases of a 300 ca. passengers box-wing aircraft, called PrandtlPlane, proposed as an efficient alternative for future air transport. The paper presents the workflow carried out during the project, starting from the definition of Top Level Aircraft Requirements up to the preliminary design of a conservative and improvable baseline configuration , which has been object of high-fidelity assessment in order to compare its performance with a 200 ca. passenger reference conventional aircraft from the same category (ICOA-ARC-4C). In order to better understand the advantages of adopting the box-wing configuration, the comparison also includes a derived version of the PrandtlPlane, designed considering the same passenger amount of the reference conventional aircraft. Finally, the paper shows the studies carried out to improve the baseline configuration in terms of aerodynamics and flight mechanics, describing also the way forward for the next steps for the refinement of the 300 passengers version. The activities here described are part of a research project called PARSIFAL (“Prandtlplane ARchitecture for the Sustainable Improvement of Future AirpLanes”), which has been funded by European Union under the Horizon 2020 Program.