Oversimplified explanation: deflecting either flaps/ailerons/spoilers or any combination, in opposition direction to the gust, or air mass movement, to dampen the aircraft’s natural tendency to follow those.
The first I heard about that was on the Airbus 321, where engineers were seemingly able keep the spar to a certain dimension iso a beefier one, on the theory that the LAF would absorb some the structural loads during acceleration.
Not sure what happened, but the system was seemingly dropped after a while, and I think reintroduced when sharklets equipped wings were brought in, but don’t quote me on that
Now the main problem I see is the system always being late on the required reactions, the wear and tear on the flight controls, and of course the complexity (B$$$$) of such a system.
How turbulence is felt depends on mass and speed.
What I see as smooth air, with gain and loss of height alternating, would be like driving on a potholed road at airliner speed.
What I see as turbulence would require much faster control surface movements than are currently possible to counteract.
And the airframe stress resulting? I was taught to centre controls, reduce speed, and wait in severe turbulence.
Cancelled today due to a Severe Turbulence SIGMET.
It would be interesting to know what wind shear/ gust factor might be expected in these conditions. At EGLM it felt like 25G50 :)
Gust factors shrink the manoeuvring envelope, not dissimilar to the shrinkage associated with rolling g, of around 40%.
Typically, extending trailing edge flaps also shrinks the manoeuvring envelope, again by around 40%, with the negative g reduced to zero.
Further edit to ponder how this technology would work at typical jet airline transonic speeds? I assume commercial airlines is the target audience.
Reducing “felt” turbulence requires that you are able to act on a time scale smaller than that of the feeling of turbulence. Anything longer than a second I would argue is not hugely useful (since 1sec oscillations are not really felt by the body as mere vibrations but as actual accelerations).
So in about a second or less, you have to :
The flow adapting to a new configuration / incidence is probably quite fast, but still not negligible (if it’s determined by airspeed, it would take 1/20" to stabilize around a 1m thick wing at 50m/s).
Definitely a hard feat to accomplish, and maybe very scary to install and use.
A delta wing will automatically (aerodynamically) counteract turbulence.
I just saw the video from Shark where they announce the integration of this technology into their aircraft – by the looks of things, they have two tubes projecting forward from the wing which identify the movement of air in front of the aircraft and automatically send signals to a tab which is a subsection of the trim tab to offset the turbulence…. also interesting is they are providing an oxygen generator with each turbo aircraft such that those aircraft can take advantage of their service ceilings…..
Thanks. I posted a link to that oxygen concentrator in the respective thread.