Physicists have found the key to turbulence in aircraft

In an airplane, Professor Bjorn Burnir pretends to be sleeping – out of fear that a neighbor’s neighbor will ask what he earns a living. All because Burnir is one of the leading in the world of specialists in turbulence. Therefore, the questions are almost inevitable: why does the airliners are sometimes shaking mercilessly? Is it dangerous? What is science ready to offer as measures of struggle?

These issues are increasingly bothering air passengers. Once simply seeming just a background stimulus of civil aviation, along with tasteless food and lack of foot space, strong turbulence now happens more often. According to the British study, from 1979 to 2020, the turbulence of the clear sky over the North Atlantic became 55%.

“I thought many times that it would be wonderful if we could make air travel a little more comfortable,” admits Dr. Birnir, who leads the center of complex and non-linear sciences at the University of California at Santa Barbara and heads the department of mathematics there.

His last contribution to this effort is a recent article in a scientific journal Physical Review ResearchWhich represents, according to the author, perhaps the most advanced model of the turbulent movement. She should help engineers seeking to fly safer and less stressful, hopes Burnir.

“The design of aircraft will benefit from this. We must definitely see the best meteorological models, ”he said.

“The better the model, the more it captures the features of a particular turbulent field, the more accurate the forecast that will use the pilot,” the honored professor of aviation technology of the university of Peresi Thomas Carney, who flew more than 11,000 hours as a pilot.

Flights on American air carriers remain extremely safe, but recent incidents began to undermine trust in commercial aviation. At the end of July, several people were injured due to a clash with unexpectedly strong turbulence over Vioming. The pilots tried to avoid bad weather, but unexpectedly fell into the zone of turbulent flows.

Turbulence has long challenged scientists, although in recent years researchers have made significant changes to the understanding of its mechanisms. The Nobel Prize laureate Richard Feynman called it “the most important unresolved problem of classical physics.”

One of the difficulties lies in the fact that the turbulence “based on many moving parts, so to speak: temperature, pressure, wind and so on,” explained Patrick Smith, who writes about aviation on his ASK the Pilot website: “Factors and conditions that cause turbulence can change very quickly.”

The system is chaotic by nature and refuses to develop according to the predictable scenario. Particles in the turbulent movement “begin to disperse in different directions,” says Tanner Harms, who studied turbulence in the graduate school of the California Technological Institute.

According to him, these directions are extremely difficult to accurately simulate: “The definition of chaos is almost woven into turbulence itself.”

To understand the chaos, Dr. Burnir, together with Louise Angelutu-Bauer, the theoretical physicist from the University of Oslo, developed a model that combines two different methods for observing turbulence-Lagranzhev and Eylerov mechanics. Separately, they cannot fully explain turbulence.

This is because these two concepts consider fundamentally different aspects of the turbulent system. In Lagrange Mechanics, researchers observe a separate particle, while in the Euler approach they look at the only point in space. Simplified, Lagrange Mechanics is how to observe a sheet floating along the river, subordinating whims of whirlpools. On the other hand, the mechanic Eilers are how to observe a stone protruding from the surface of the river, and to study how the turbulence of water moves around this fixed point.

Lagranzhev is more difficult to simulate turbulence, because it requires an understanding of the behavior of a single particle-and that, according to Birnir, can “make the most difficult movement that you can imagine”.

Understanding how each type of turbulence fits into the overall picture is similar to the choice of a suitable lens for a microscope, since both depend on the prospect.

“The same turbulence, different stories. None of the views can be called wrong – these are just different ways to ask nature a question, ”said Tomek Yaroslavsky from the Center for Stanford’s Turbulence Research.

He and the angel used both theoretical and statistical approaches. Previously, physicists could not create such a comprehensive model of turbulent movement. “The result is no doubt innovative,” assessed Katepally Srinivasan, the former dean of the Tangenda Engineering School of New York University.

The aforementioned DELTA flight over Weyoming “is similar to a typical example of strong intermittence in Elerine turbulence,” assumes Burnir. However, without access to the initial data, the final analysis is impossible. Nevertheless, it is obvious that The best understanding of turbulence would allow pilots to take preventive measures, for example, reducing the engine power in order to counteract the euler irregularity through which they flew.

Carni admitted that some of the work of Birnir and Angeluts is not fully understood and, probably, it would seem too complicated to any pilot without experience in computational hydrodynamics. But this does not detract from her potential utility, he emphasized: “I am sure that they expand our knowledge.”

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