Wake Impact Alleviation Control Based on Wake Identification

Abstract

During a wake-vortex encounter, an aircraft can experience significant attitude and flight-path changes, which can represent a severe safety risk. The application of a wake impact alleviation control system can considerably decrease the aircraft’s response during the wake encounter and hence diminish the pilot workload while reducing the potential risk to the passengers, crew, and aircraft. The realization of a wake impact alleviation controller presented here is based on a forward-looking light detection and ranging (LIDAR) sensor. The information about the disturbance velocities in front of the aircraft is used to determine the control-surface deflections that compensate the wake-induced disturbance moments. The novel approach of this concept is the combination of the wake impact alleviation system with a wake identification algorithm. Because of the integration of the identification algorithm, it is possible to apply the wake impact alleviation with LIDAR sensors restricted to line-of-sight measurements only. The wake-identification-based wake impact alleviation is assessed in numerical aircraft simulations for different encounter scenarios, and a sensitivity study is performed for the parameters of the wake identification. It is shown that the alleviation system significantly reduces the wake-induced attitude change of the aircraft and thus represents a promising concept to increase safety during wake-vortex encounters.