The Quebec-based manufacturer known for, among other things, their expertise in designing and building business jets, has brought into their EcoJet Research Project the University of Victoria’s Centre for Aviation Research (CfAR) and Victoria-based Quaternion Aerospace. The EcoJet project was created around 15 years ago to explore new technologies to reduce emissions in business jets, specifically blended wing body (BWB) configurations.
UVic’s CfAR and Quaternion Aerospace bring scale model expertise to the project.
“For more than a decade, the Centre for Aerospace Research has grown from strength to strength, and our cutting-edge work with Bombardier represents the most significant research partnership in our history,” said Dr. Afzal Suleman of the CfAR, who also serves as the CEO of Quaternion Aerospace.
In 2017 a scale model with an 8-foot wingspan was created and now the project is equipped with a prototype with an 18-foot wingspan. It first flew in 2022 and can be flown autonomously.
“Bombardier is proud to support forward-looking aerospace research all while involving a broad network of academic institutions,” Bombardier’s senior vice president Stephen McCullough said. “Our engineers are eager to start working with the results yielded by this second phase of the flight test program. Building on the significant data drawn from the initial flight-testing phase, and now leveraging a model twice as large as the first prototype, we can further refine our analysis.”
Bombardier stresses that this is a pan-Canadian project and that the company will soon reveal further collaborations with academic institutions.