Turbulence solutions

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 :

• detect turbulence (presumably by measuring acceleration, which takes some amount of time because of noisy MEMS, and means the disruptive flow is already setup around the wing and lift has already increased a little)
• deflect the elevator (I would be scared of any servo that’s able to substantially move an elevator that fast)
• the flow around the elevator has to establish with the new configuration
• the aircraft has to rotate somewhat to change the main wing’s incidence
• the flow around the wing has to establish to (e.g.) reduce lift
  You may also get structural elastic oscillations after that, which may be another problem.

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.

Thanks. I posted a link to that oxygen concentrator in the respective thread.