ADMS-Airport

Comprehensive software for air quality management for airports

What is ADMS-Airport?

ADMS-Airport is a comprehensive tool for managing air quality at airports. It is an extension of the ADMS-Urban model, designed to model the concentration of pollutants at airports in rural or complex urban environments.

Who uses ADMS-Airport?

ADMS-Airport has been used to model air quality at London's Heathrow airport for the 2002 base case and future year scenarios as part of the Department for Transport's (DfT) Project for Sustainable Development of Heathrow (PSDH)—Adding Capacity at Heathrow.

This followed the recommendations of the PSDH Model Inter-comparison Study.

ADMS-Airport is also one of the participating models in the International Civil Aviation Organisation, Committee on Aviation Environmental Protection (ICAO CAEP) model exercises.

Why use ADMS-Airport?

ADMS-Airport incorporates all the features of ADMS-Urban plus it is able to incorporate sources specific to an airport. ADMS-Airport is able to take into account the whole range of relevant emission sources: aircraft traffic, auxiliary power units, ground support equipment, road traffic, industrial, commercial, domestic and other less well-defined sources.

ADMS-Airport and EMIT (CERC's Emissions Inventory Toolkit) have been developed with a number of features to simplify the modelling process and help users. For example:

Visualisation	ADMS-Airport has links to ArcGIS and MapInfo Professional GIS (Geographical Information System) packages as well as Surfer contour plotting package. The GIS link can be used to enter and display input data and display output, usually as colour contour plots.
Emissions inventory	Source and emissions data can be imported from a Microsoft Access database created by the user or exported from EMIT. EMIT contains current and future emission factors including those for vehicles, industrial processes and fuel consumption.
Emission factors (in EMIT)	Issue 15 of the ICAO emission factors (released July 2007) can be used to calculate emissions from the thrust setting, time in mode and the number of landing-take-off cycles. FAA emission factors can be used to calculate APU emissions from the operation time. Emission factors derived from EC Non Road Mobile Machinery (EC directive 97/68/EC) limit values can be used to calculate GSE emissions from the operation time. The latest UK DMRB emission factors (released February 2003) can be used to calculate emissions from traffic flows and speeds.
Intelligent gridding	ADMS-Airport includes an intelligent gridding option which places extra output points in and adjacent to aircraft jet sources and road sources to give excellent spatial resolution in areas of particular interest.
User-defined outputs	The user defines the pollutant and averaging time which may be an annual average or a shorter period, and also which percentiles and exceedence values to calculate, and whether a rolling average is required or not. The output options are designed to be flexible to cater for the variety of air quality limits which can vary from country to country and over time.

ADMS jet module

ADMS-Airport makes use of the ADMS jet model to calculate the impact of aircraft exhausts. The jet model calculates an integral solution to the equations of conservation of mass, momentum, heat and species, capturing the effect of the movement of the jet engine source in reducing the effective buoyancy of the exhaust. This is particularly important in capturing the near-field dispersion from the high momentum, buoyant take-off ground roll sources.

Hourly profiles

To model the airport's flight schedule in detail users can construct up to 500 annual hourly profiles. These detailed schedules can also be used for detailed modelling of non-airport sources, such as the effect of school terms and public holidays on road traffic. For less detailed time dependent modelling ADMS-Airport allows up to 50 diurnal and 50 monthly profiles plus wind direction dependence for any source.