Ivan de Visscher's PhD Thesis

The study of aircraft wake vortex behavior is of great interest for Air Traffic Management. The separation standards between aircraft are indeed based on the hazard related to the encounter of such vortices by a following aircraft. This thesis is dedicated to the characterization and the modeling of the behavior of aircraft wake vortices interacting with the atmosphere and/or with the ground.
Large Eddy Simulations (LES) are employed to study the evolution of wake vortices in various atmospheric conditions, with a particular attention paid to the realistic representation of both the vortices and the atmosphere. The detailed analysis of the simulation results brings new insights that enable a better understanding of the physics governing the wake vortex behavior.
A large-scale experimental database is then analyzed in detail. Statistical correlations are established between the wake vortex transport and decay and the measured crosswind. Finally, LES results (including those performed in this thesis) and experimental measurement databases are used to develop and improve physics-based operational models. Those models are simplified, so that they can be run faster than real-time. Yet, they are verified to correctly represent the transport and decay of wake vortices interacting with the atmosphere and with the ground. Those models are integrated in an operational platform called WAKE4D.
The model improvements and developments have made the WAKE4D platform a software sufficiently mature that it is now used as a tool for operational offline studies and real-time systems.

Jury :
Professeur Grégoire WINCKELMANS, promoteur (UCL)
Professeur Thomas PARDOEN, président (UCL)
Professeur François DUPRET, secrétaire (UCL)
Professeur Hervé JEANMART (UCL)
Professeur Daniele CARATI (ULB, Belgique)
Professeur Thomas LEWEKE (IRPHE-CNRS, France)