Measurement of Aircraft Wake Vortices Using Doppler LIDAR

Abstract

In this research, the wake turbulence from actual passenger airplanes taking off from Sendai airport was measured with Electronic Navigation Research Institute's Doppler laser radar (lidar). First, the influence of the surrounding wind on the behavior of wake vortices was investigated. The wake vortices in the crosswind case disappear more quickly from the runway than those of the low surrounding wind and head wind cases. In addition, the wake vortices in the case of large crosswind move faster than those in small crosswind. Next, the correction factor was estimated by using the pseudo lidar measurements based on Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). The corrected data for weak surrounding wind case agreed with the existing wake vortex model.

Keywords

• measurement
• aircraft
• wake vortex
• lidar