Development of blended wing body aircraft design

Given the expected more severe limitations by international aviation organizations, the Blended Wing Body (BWB) appeared as an up and coming aircraft design being developed around the globe for the past decades. This article... [ view full abstract ]

Given the expected more severe limitations by international aviation organizations, the Blended Wing Body (BWB) appeared as an up and coming aircraft design being developed around the globe for the past decades. This article focuses on bibliographical research about key advantages of the BWB aircraft concept in respect to conventional tube and wing (TAW) design and about limits and crucial decision-making in the design of such aircrafts. Our goal with the current paper is to get an insight into the current state of the art on BWB. This, in turn, allowed us to identify BWB's advantages and limitations, to locate the current development centers for BWB, to establish cartography of the various BWB projects existing worldwide and to devise correlations or tendencies for critical parameters from the technical specifications of the existing BWB and TAW designs. In order to do so, we proceeded to inquire scientific databases in order to acquire and filter data and research concerning the BWB development over the past recent years. A statistical analysis allowed us to seize the development tendencies of the design both in space and time. Following this analysis we proceeded to a dissection of the main characteristics - pros and cons - of the BWB as well as a comparison between the BWB and the TAW design from a weight performance point of view. Results, while unexpected, show that while the BWB seems appropriate for ultra high capacity aircrafts (800+ PAX) and fairs well in the small capacity sector (100-200 PAX), there's still place for progress concerning the high capacity (450 PAX) long range (transatlantic) BWB.