Features

UC engineer’s design eliminates wing turbulence

Bay City News Service

Thursday November 22, 2001

BERKELEY – Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley say they are working to patent a design for aircraft wings that could dramatically cut the strength of wake turbulence.

The researchers say that the innovation, which adds triangular flaps to wings, would make wake turbulence, the force that may have played a role in the deadly crash of American Airlines Flight 587 in New York last week, harmless.

“The wing we designed could make substantial differences in flight safety and airport capacity,” says UC Berkeley mechanical engineering professor Omer Savas.

Aviation officials have said that they believe that the tail fin of the A300 jet tore off the plane after pilots hit the wake turbulence, or tornado-like wind patterns, left by a Japan-bound Boeing 747 that had taken off two minutes earlier.

Wake turbulence is created by the mismatch of speed, direction and pressure of the air that moves above and underneath a plane. The differences govern the lift that is generated during flight.

Depending on weather conditions, and the plane's speed and size, the wake vortices are generally stable and can stretch a distance of hundreds of wingspans, or three to five miles for commercial aircraft.

Savas said while wake turbulence alone is not the likely cause of Flight 587’s crash, the turbulence added to a damaged tail fin “could be devastating.”

Savas, along with former graduate students Jason Ortega and Robert

Bristol, came up with the wing design that adds a triangular flap to the

wings, to create a shape similar than that of a bat's wing.

The flaps create additional vortices that rotate in opposite

directions and run into each other.

"It's like two tornadoes shredding each other,'' Savas said. "One

is spinning clockwise, the other counterclockwise, so each one counteracts

the other.''

Savas said the flaps would allow planes to take off and land

within closer time frames without compromising safety.

The idea of getting rid of wake vortices is not a new one, and

wing designs in the past have included small pulsing jets mounted at the