Keeping it light and smart with Diehl Aviation
This is a special feature from PAX Tech's October 2024 APEX Global EXPO issue
The future cabin at AIX 2024
When it comes to the aircraft of the future, two topics predominate: First, enabling emission-free flying by 2050. Less weight plays a key role in this. Second, making the promises of digitalization a reality. The cabin specialist Diehl Aviation is developing such innovations, as can be seen in the Future Cabin.
Dr. Dietmar Voelkle, Director Research, Diehl Aviation
“With the Future Cabin, we want to demonstrate the possibilities the cabin holds in terms of sustainability,” says Dr. Dietmar Voelkle, Director Research, Diehl Aviation. The concept brings together ideas, visions and specific innovations. “For us, it’s also a test platform to see what will work.”
New paths
One look is all it takes to see that Diehl is embarking on new paths with
the Future Cabin. The cabin ceiling is interwoven by an unusual pattern.
Light does not come from spotlights or strips, but from ceiling floods covering
large areas of the ceiling. The windows
are partially replaced by high-tech
screens that offer a view to the outside
while delivering additional information
(about the flight route, for example).
Diehl’s industrial design division rethinks the cabin relying on bionic structures, among other things. This type of construction—modelled after nature—has been forward-thinking for many years. For example, the ceiling design resembles the structures in a leaf or a dragonfly wing. Components with bionic structures are not only aesthetic but can also be up to 30 percent lighter than conventional elements.
The bionic design is more sustainable when combined with new, recyclable materials, such as bio-based resins and fibers which Diehl is testing. The principle involves using chemical processes to refine natural resources into usable materials which, ideally, are fed back into a production cycle by means of recycling. Several initial concepts are already being created, such as the ECO Brackets used to fix overhead bins.
Diehl plans to make them out of thermoplastic in the future, which is fully recovered from recycled components. Due to their integrated fiber reinforcement, ECO Brackets would weigh less than the parts currently used.
Diehl is rethinking its ECO Sidewall as well, combining everything that is already being used for sustainability purposes as a consequence of maximum weight reduction. To do so, the company is using the latest composite materials as well as a proprietary powder coating. In production, the carbon footprint is reduced up to 20 percent and fibrous production waste drops by a third.
Powder coating also reduces weight and CO2 consumption by 10 percent compared with conventional side- walls. The ECO Sidewall is already available for newly built aircraft.
“Sustainability is not negotiable but a duty for everyone involved,” says Voelkle. “We at Diehl have been developing innovations for years that are contributing to this. The technologies in the Future Cabin are another step in this direction.”
Making cabins smart
Diehl Aviation relies on consistent digitalization. Lothar Trunk
heads up this department as Senior
Expert for Cabin Systems.
He says the goal is to collect, analyze and permanently use cabin data to better plan energy and water consumption, facilitate maintenance and increase passenger comfort.
To that end, Diehl and more than a dozen partners (including aircraft manufacturers, airlines, suppliers and universities) launched the research project i+sCabin. The first step was to develop a uniform communication standard. In the future, all the cabin’s elements, from LEDs to kitchen appliances to displays, will communicate via this standard.
The next stage of the project entails collecting and analyzing the cabin data in a structured manner. The potential for more sustainability is considerable, Trunk explains. Airlines will be able to track how much fresh water or coffee is consumed on which flights, derive forecasts from this and plan the quantities of onboard resources more efficiently. The same goes for energy consumption.
Data from the Future Cabin also expands the possibilities for maintenance and repairs. With the new possibilities offered by data collection, correlations can be discovered much more quickly with the support of AI systems. This will avoid unnecessary repairs or replacements and make predictive maintenance easier.
