Optimization of aircraft wake alleviation schemes through an evolution strategy

Abstract

We investigate schemes to accelerate the decay of aircraft trailing vortices. These structures are susceptible to several instabilities that lead to their eventual destruction. We employ an Evolution Strategy to design a lift distribution and a lift perturbation scheme that minimize the wake hazard as proposed in [6]. The performance of a scheme is measured as the reduction of the mean rolling moment that would be induced on a following aircraft; it is computed by means of a Direct Numerical Simulation using a parallel vortex particle code. We find a configuration and a perturbation scheme characterized by an intermediate wavelength λ ∼ 4.64, necessary to trigger medium wavelength instabilities between tail and flap vortices and subsequently amplify long wavelength modes. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.