Plate Lines Reduce Lifetime of Wake Vortices During Final Approach to Vienna Airport

Abstract

To mitigate the risk of wake vortex encounters during final approach, so-called plate lines have been developed. Wake vortices generated by landing aircraft induce secondary vortices at the plates' surfaces that approach the primary vortices and trigger premature wake vortex decay. Each plate line consists of several upright plates that are installed underneath the approach glide path. While the plate line extends perpendicular to the flight direction, its individual plates are oriented in parallel to the runway centerline. In order to obtain the approval of the authorities for the installation of the plate lines at runway 16 of Vienna International Airport, the plate design had to comply with airport requirements like obstacle clearance, stability, and frangibility. During a six-month campaign wake vortex behavior with and without plates was measured simultaneously by three lidars completed by a comprehensive suite of meteorological instrumentation. A preliminary analysis of 430 measured wake vortex evolutions indicates that the plate lines reduce the lifetime of longlived vortices in a safety corridor along the final approach on average by more than 30%. More comprehensive analyses are underway and will be presented at the AVIATION Forum 2020 in Reno.

Mitigating Wake Turbulence Risk During Final Approach Via Plate Lines

“…The steel tube was connected by a rope with a van that accelerated to about 35 km/h before the rope got strained (see Figure 3 in Ref. 20). A weak link with a breaking force of 10 kN connected with the rope made sure that the prescribed maximum force of 45 kN was not exceeded when the abruptly accelerated steel tube broke the plate prototype.…”

Mitigating Wake Turbulence Risk During Final Approach via Plate Lines

“…3 in Ref. [20]). A weak link with a breaking force of 10 kN connected with the rope made sure that the prescribed maximum force of 45 kN was not exceeded when the abruptly accelerated steel tube broke the plate prototype.…”

“…A preliminary analysis of the measurement data has been reported in Ref. [20] together with a more detailed description of the demonstration of frangibility of the elaborated plate design. A precursor version of this paper has been presented at the AIAA Aviation 2020 Forum [21].…”

“…Fig 20. Measurements of A320 wake vortices in 50 m safety corridor for headwinds lower than 2 m∕s with both plate lines (left) and only plate line 1 (right).…”

A nudged hybrid analysis and modeling approach for realtime wake-vortex transport and decay prediction

“…While the current solutions range from actively modifying/dissipating the wake-vortices using physical devices [5,6] to accurately estimating the strengths of the vortices using LIDARS and RADARS [2,7]. One shortfall of the two approaches is that none of them predicts the evolution of the vortices in the future.…”