On the eve of EBACE Aerion Corporation announced the launch of Aerion Technologies, which will be offering natural laminar flow (NLF) expertise. Top Flight Editor-in-Chief Veronica Sipeeva met Aerion CFO Douglas Nichols to find out the details on the new project.

Why have you decided to extend your field of activity? What is the task of the new Aerion Technologies initiative?

Over the last several years we have been working closely with several premier original equipment airframe manufacturers regarding our upcoming supersonic business jet (SBJ). As our discussions with the OEMs continued it has become clear that our technology is very scalable. Not only will it work for a supersonic airplane but also on transonic or subsonic aircraft. Subsonic aircraft can be optimised for either much higher speed – but still subsonic – or much longer range or much higher efficiency. Efficiency and range are two sides of the same coin. It has been at the request of the OEMs that we began doing more work at the subsonic arena and decided to offer additional services through a business unit called Aerion Technologies. It is a natural extension of what we have been doing, a way to deal with and actually dispose of technical risk areas, particularly in terms of surface quality and smoothness. Natural laminar flow requires a very smooth surface on the wing. So one of the open issues with the OEMs has to do with how robust the laminar flow is given current manufacturing technology.

We’ll be focused on helping the OEMs develop new aircraft that will meet higher efficiency, higher speed goals and explore the areas of technology development that can be applied there. We are really quite excited about it and we are actively engaged in discussions with more than two OEMs at the moment.

Will you be acting as a consultant?

Yes. Actually, Aerion Technologies offers proprietary technology. We have a number of new patents related to laminar flow. Laminar flow is a physical concept that has been in the aviation industry for decades. Our technology has to do with relatively low swept thin wings, which have special shapes and contours. It’s all about the application of the laminar flow to the wing. Through Aerion Technologies’ consulting work we will be helping the OEMs understand how to apply our proprietary technology to achieve laminar flow consistently over large areas of the wing in order to reduce drag and improve speed efficiency. Aerion uses proprietary multidisciplinary optimisation tools to do thousands of optimisations of individual combinations of sweep, thickness, and other configuration parameters. It’s the proprietary technology and the tools to apply it that we’re making available through Aerion Technologies. This is not a change in direction for Aerion, but an augmentation of our existing direction to get us more deeply involved with the OEMs introducing this airplane.

Will NLF in your opinion require a clean-sheet design?

A clean-sheet design provides the greatest opportunity for improvement by minimizing drag through both optimization of wing and body surfaces, plus the incorporation of design features to achieve extensive amounts of natural laminar flow.

Which material will be preferable to utilize in the structure of the wing and the body?

The wing will be carbon fiber for two reasons. Firstly, our wings are relatively thin and so a material with a high stiffness-to-weight ratio is necessary for structural loads. Secondly, carbon fiber is very smooth, which provides the necessary surface quality to achieve and maintain extensive natural laminar flow over most of the wing surface. The leading edge, however, will be titanium. When it comes to the body – that is really a design trade based upon weight, cost and other considerations. Chances are that the body would also be of advanced composite materials like that of the Boeing 787, though aluminium technology would also be fine. But definitely the wing will be a carbon fiber whether it’s a subsonic airplane or a supersonic airplane.

A decade from now we are going to see many airplanes that will have thinner less swept wings as opposed to what we see now. I think the design space is going to change and the industry is going to realise that lower swept wings are going to make airplanes go faster and burn less fuel at the same time.

You mentioned the potential beneficial effect from NLF. Which results do you expect to achieve?

Generally speaking, natural laminar flow, which is a free technology in that it does not require any active systems but simply needs to be designed from the start. NLF can reduce the skin friction drag on the wing by as much as a 90%. The overall drag reduction is in the order of 20% on this airplane as compared to a conventional design. On a subsonic airplane the application of our technology and laminar flow can result in 10-15% reduction in total drag, which is a very large performance improvement. And in this virtuous cycle, lower drag means lower weight, which means a smaller engine, which in turn means less fuel, and so on.

Speaking about the supersonic aircraft, what is the current status of the SBJ program?

We’ve concluded an additional round of flight tests conducted with NASA during the summer of 2010 to measure and calibrate the flow field beneath their F-15B aircraft. The data gathered in those flights are being used to design and fabricate a new test article that will be flown in late 2011 to measure the surface quality requirements to maintain extensive amounts of natural laminar flow. This is an important area of investigation that will establish allowable tolerances for surface imperfections in manufacturing processes.

We continue advancing the preliminary design of the SBJ itself. On the technical side, we’ve been refining the wing and the nacelle designs. Our commercial discussions with the OEMs have been proceeding well, though slower than we would like due generally to the downturn in the industry. That downturn two years ago significantly affected the ability of the OEMs to take on a new 3 billion dollar development project. As the industry recovers – and we are seeing very positive signs of that now – we expect that those discussions will accelerate as well.

When do you expect to start SBJ production?

We have always maintained that the program will take about five years from a hard launch with an OEM to certification and delivery. A few years ago, we were optimistic that the SBJ would be well into the development cycle now. The downturn has pushed the schedule to the right. As the economy improves, OEMs will be more comfortable taking on the investment. It is not just a matter of financial resources, but also the ability of an OEM to commit to new development with other product development priorities and to dedicate the necessary engineering resources.

How have these three tough years influenced the SBJ backlog?

Our backlog has remained relatively constant. In the past we have around 4 billion dollar order book. During this downturn we’ve had some orders drop off, but we’ve also added a few as well.

How many people are busy with this project?

Within Aerion we have about 25 full time equivalent employees. Aerion has a larger extended resource base of engineers who have been involved in the technology for many years and who work for us on a consulting basis. We have the ability to grow our resource base very quickly and we’ll probably do that with Aerion Technologies as we do more work for the OEMs on the subsonic area.