Turbulence model could help aircraft handle extreme scenarios

It is hoped that their work could be useful in situations such as an incident in 2018, when passengers onboard a flight to Australia experienced a 10-second nosedive when a vortex trailing their plane crossed into the wake of another flight. The collision of these vortices, the airline suspected, created violent turbulence that led to a free fall.

The team’s approach is said to simulate the entire process of a vortex collision at a reduced computational time, enabling this physics knowledge to be incorporated into engineering design codes so that the aircraft responds appropriately. 

Simulations currently used by aircraft designers only capture a portion of vortex collision events and require extensive data processing on a supercomputer. With more realistic and complete simulations, researchers believe engineers could design aircraft such as fighter jets capable of more abrupt manoeuvres or helicopters that can land more safely on aircraft carriers.

“Aircraft in extreme conditions cannot rely on simple modelling,” said Carlo Scalo, a Purdue associate professor of medical engineering with a courtesy appointment in aeronautics and astronautics. “Just to troubleshoot some of these calculations can take running them on a thousand processors for a month. You need faster computation to do aircraft design.”