When Europe launched its second multiyear civil aeronautics research program, Clean Sky 2, in 2014, it carved out funds to look at radical aircraft configurations that could potentially replace today's conventional designs for airliners entering service in 2035.Contracts to evaluate these configurations were awarded in 2016 to three teams led by French research agency Onera, German aerospace center DLR and by NLR and the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) in the Netherlands.Under the Clean Sky-funded Novair project, TU Delft and Dutch aerospace laboratory NLR are studyingconfigurations with distributed hybrid-electric propulsion (DHEP), in the hope that synergistic effects between the propulsion system and airframe can be exploited to reduce overall energy consumption.
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