Integrating Sustainability in Aircraft Component Design: Towards a Transition from Eco-Driven to Sustainability-Driven Design

Eco-design is an innovative design methodology that focuses on minimizing the environmental foot-print of industries, including aviation, right from the conceptual and development stages. However, rising industrial demand calls for a more comprehensive strategy where, beyond environmental con-siderations, competitiveness becomes a critical factor, supported by additional pillars of sustainabil-ity such as economic viability, circularity, and social impact. By incorporating sustainability as a primary design driver at the initial design stages, this study suggests a shift from eco-driven to sus-tainability-driven design approaches for aircraft components. This expanded strategy considers per-formance and safety goals, environmental impact, costs, social factors, and circular economy consid-erations. To provide the most sustainable design that balances all objectives, these aspects are rigor-ously quantified and optimized during the design process. To efficiently prioritize different variables, methods such as multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) are employed, and a Sustainability Index is developed in this framework to assess the overall sustainability of each design alternative. The most sustainable design configurations are then identified through an optimization process. A typical air-craft component, namely a hat-stiffened panel, is selected to demonstrate the proposed approach. The study highlights how effectively sustainability considerations can be integrated from the early stages of the design process by exploring diverse material combinations and geometric configurations. This innovative approach enhances the overall sustainability of aircraft components, emphasizing the importance and benefits of incorporating a broader range of sustainability factors at the conceptual and initial design phases.