Recently, NASA has announced several projects in development that could well serve the benefit of commercial aviation, among these projects is a new system to detect turbulence miles away, the benefit that can be expected from this technological contribution will be for the good of the safety of crew and passengers of the various airlines, minimizing mishaps and increasing confidence for the pilot and users.
Contents
A benefit for airlines
Of the various situations that can affect an apparently calm flight, turbulence is possibly the most annoying, although it is not highly dangerous, it can cause minor injuries to passengers and crew members. However, despite the minor danger involved, most commercial flights try to avoid them as far as possible, having to deviate slightly from the expected flight course, but; to deviate from that path it is necessary to consume more fuel than expected, in some cases, large amounts that lead to an economic loss for airlines, therefore, the development of part of NASA; which can detect turbulence miles away can revolutionize flight planning, reducing fuel costs involved in avoiding turbulence, benefiting the air transport industry.
How does this technology work?
The technology proposed by NASA researchers works by detecting the vibrations of sound waves, everything in the atmosphere can emit sound, this, like light, is composed of different frequencies, within these frequencies is the infrasound that tones between 0.001 and 20 hertz, this is too low to be audible to the human ear.
Sudden turbulence experienced on ordinary flights is called clear air turbulence because there are no visible clouds or atmospheric “symptoms” to warn pilots and flight operators of the turbulence. Turbulence can appear out of nowhere, invisibly, and wreak havoc on the flight. However, turbulence, although not visible, generates an infrasonic “footprint”.
NASA Hampton Virginia researchers Qamar Shams and Allan Zuckerwar devised a system that allows pilots and operators to hear the formation of these invisible turbulences from miles away via microphones, which would allow enough time to avoid them on an efficient alternate route.
Special microphones for listening for turbulence
To carry out the development of the system, special microphones were needed that were capable of detecting infrasound without the higher-volume frequencies interfering with their task. Therefore, one of the first problems was the saturation of the microphones due to the saturation of louder sounds. NASA researchers had to develop their own microphones.
The microphones developed by Qamar Shams and Allan Zuckerwar use a moving diaphragm to pick up audio combined with a wide-radius low-voltage diaphragm, along with a large rear air chamber to allow ultra-low sound waves to be heard. The device was finally put to the test in Pennsylvania, being able to detect the “sound” of turbulence more than 450 kilometers away.
What do you think about this topic, and do you know of any other recent technology for detecting turbulence?
If you have any doubt or question you can contact us or write your query in the comments section below.
Image by PublicDomainPictures via Pixabay under Creative Commons license.
