Water injection on aircraft engines: a performance, emissions and economic study

Although aviation based emissions are not the major sources of atmospheric pollution, their impact around the airport vicinity and the increase in air transport makes it a concern. Water injection on aircraft engines can reduce NOx emissions around the airports significantly. This has been demonstrated in research study by NASA Glenn Research Center in collaboration with Boeing Company. The aim of this study is to investigate the performance, emissions and economic aspects of water ingestion for medium and high bypass ratio jet engines using Cranfield University in-house gas turbine simulation software. British Airways was chosen as a representative airline to be used as case study in order to examine the effects of this technology. Performance and emissions models were developed for the most popular aircraft of the fleet, along with their engines. The simulations were focused on the take-off phase of the aircraft, injecting water in the low pressure compressor (LPC) and the combustor, for different water-toair ratios. The results were optimized in terms of fuel burn and verified against the respective results from the NASA study [1]. Finally, an economic model was developed in order to evaluate the monetary impact of these systems, from the point of view of an airliner with a specific number of aircraft in their fleet. The main outcomes of this study show that LPC water injection can provide more than 10% take-off thrust augmentation in a standard day when in hot days it can exceed 25%. Alternatively, the specific fuel consumption at take-off can reach a 10% reduction, for a fixed take-off thrust level. On the other hand, combustor water injection penalizes the engine performance in all cases. Additionally, depending on the point of injection and the water to air ratio, NOx emissions reduction ranges between 25%-85%. Finally, for the case study examined here, the value for the annual monetary benefit due to water injection can reach 599,654£, without taking into account the airport emission based fees. An investment of such sort could present a dynamic payback period of 7.5 years, assuming constant market interest of 8% and 10 years operational life of the equipment.