AAAR 33rd Annual Conference
October 20 - October 24, 2014
Rosen Shingle Creek
Orlando, Florida, USA
Abstract View
An Overview of the NASA ACCESS Flight Experiment
BRUCE ANDERSON, Richard Moore, Andreas Beyersdorf, Charles Hudgins, Robert Martin, Michael Shook, Kenneth Thornhill, Edward Winstead, Luke Ziemba, Aaron Swanson, NASA
Abstract Number: 535 Working Group: Aerosols, Clouds, and Climate
Abstract Although the emission performance of gas-turbine engines burning alternative aviation fuels have been thoroughly documented in recent ground-based studies, there is still great uncertainty regarding how the fuels effect aircraft exhaust composition and contrail formation at cruise altitudes. To fill this information gap, NASA conducted a series of flight experiments using the instrumented LaRC HU-25 sampling aircraft to make detailed measurements of aerosols and ice particles in the near-field behind the NASA DC-8 aircraft as it burned either standard petroleum-based fuel or a 50:50 blend of standard fuel and a hydro-treated esters and fatty acid (HEFA) fuel produced from renewable carbon feed stocks. The first phase of this “Alternative-Fuel Effects on Contrails and Cruise EmiSSions”, or ACCESS, project was successfully conducted spring 2013 during which extensive exhaust and contrail measurements were acquired on five separate missions conducted over the Edwards Air Force Base complex in California. Additional flights (ACCESS-2) were performed during spring 2014 to further examine the effects of fuel composition on engine emissions and investigate the linkages between exhaust soot and contrail ice characteristics. This presentation describes the ACCESS flight experiments, compares cruise-altitude emission measurements with similar data from ground tests, and examines contrail microphysical properties as a function of fuel properties and plume age.