This paper presents the results of a study into wake vortex-related safety issues associated with simultaneous rotary and fixed-wing aircraft operations at busy airports. An analysis conducted using both simple analytic models and high fidelity FLIGHTLAB simulations has considered a helicopter located in the hover above the landing point and during approach and landing. Tip vortices from a Boeing 747 are shed and are assumed to be travelling in a horizontal plane by the time they reach the helicopter. A worst case scenario is simulated, with no vortex ageing or attenuation due to ground effect. Both simple and high fidelity simulations indicate that the rates of climb and descent induced by the vortex tails can be significant. When the helicopter flies through the vortex core, moderately large transient excursions in attitude occur within a few seconds. When the helicopter does not pass through or close to the core, while the flight path perturbations are still significant, the attitude response is shown to be significantly reduced. The predicted cyclic control power required to counteract the vortex-induced hub moments is about 40% of full control, compared with more than 100% for an ‘equivalent’ fixed-wing aircraft. The control power required in the vertical, collective, axis to overcome the downdraught and updraught in the vortex tails can be as high as 15–20%. While the authors have not tried to make judgements as to whether pilots would find the transients manageable, an approach to quantifying the extent of the hazard has been suggested using the failure transients criteria from the handling qualities performance standard ADS–33. Combined with analysis of the likelihood of such occurrences at particular airports, such response criteria offer a rational approach to developing safety cases for simultaneous operations.

The shock-structure and the related acoustic field of underexpanded jets undergoes significant changes as the Mach number Mj is increased. The present investigation is carried out to study the effect of Mach number on an underexpanded 2:1 elliptic-slot jet. Experimental data are presented for fully expanded Mach numbers ranging from 1.3 to 2.0. It is observed that the ‘cross-over’ point at the end of the first cell at low Mach numbers gets replaced by a normal shock at a highly underexpanded condition resulting in the formation of a ‘barrel’ shock along the minor-axis side with a ‘bulb’ shock formed along the major-axis side. The above change in shock structure is accompanied by a related change in the acoustic field. The amplitude of fundamental frequency along the minor-axis side grows with Mj but falls beyond Mj = 1.75. Along the major-axis side, however, the fundamental frequency does not exist at low Mach numbers. It appears at Mj = 1.75 but then falls at Mj = 2.0. The related azimuthal directivity of overall noise levels (OASPL) shows significant changes with Mj.

A computational study has been performed to evaluate the predictive capabilities of some existing eddy-viscosity (both linear, LEVM, and non-linear, NLEVM) and Reynolds stress transport turbulence models (RSTM) by reference to a transonic shock-induced separated flow over a 10% axisymmetric bump. The calculations have been carried out during the course of a collaborative research programme including both UK universities and industry. The findings of the project demonstrate that improved results can be obtained for such flows by using more advanced turbulence models. For linear eddy-viscosity models, only the SST approach gave good predictions of shock location, recirculation size and pressure recovery, although this was accompanied by deficiencies in the prediction of post-shock velocity profile shape. Non-linear eddy-viscosity models, particularly at the cubic level, provided a more consistent level of agreement with experiments over the range of shock location, wall pressure and velocity profile parameters. Some improvement was also seen in the prediction of turbulence quantities, although only a move to an RSTM closure model reproduced the measured peak stress levels accurately. It was notable that the use of low-Re variants of the models (instead of wall functions) produced no significant improvement in predictions. There are, however, some shortcomings in all models, particularly in the development of flow after reattachment, which was always predicted to be too slow.

Future air traffic control will be based on the distributed processing environment. This leads to the use of high-speed optical fibre networks and systems to connect many processors (for both general and specific purposes) and workstations in the air traffic control centres. To efficiently support such applications, communication systems should be capable of multirate operations. To achieve this aim, we propose an efficient optical fibre code-division multiplexing (OF-CDM) technique that can support multirate data communications without any increase of system complexity when compared with the equal-rate operation case. Unlike conventional optical orthogonal codes (OOCs), the use of our proposed unequal-length OOCs can eliminate any possible violation of the minimum cross-and auto-correlation constraint (i.e. ‘1’) in multirate OF-CDM systems. Thus, using unequal-length OOCs can achieve a better bandwidth efficiency and a lower bit error rate for multirate transmissions than employing conventional OOCs. Moreover, we present the design of cost-effective OF-CDM transmitters for multirate data transmissions. The proposed systems can be also employed to support future airborne real-time data distributions and computer interconnects.

The flow generated by a synthetic jet actuator with a circular orifice is investigated experimentally and computationally. The experimental data and computational predictions are in fair to good agreement with each other and with the theory for a steady turbulent jet. It is found, however, that the synthetic jet establishes itself much more rapidly than the steady jet, primarily because of turbulent dissipation. The oscillatory nature of synthetic jet flow also gives rise to a much greater entrainment of ambient fluid compared with the case of a steady jet. Finally, self-similarity seems to be established when the oscillations introduced by the actuator are reduced to negligible levels.