PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - AF 447 Thread no. 4
View Single Post
Old 28th Jun 2011, 15:07
  #487 (permalink)  
HarryMann
 
Join Date: Jan 2008
Location: Herts, UK
Posts: 748
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes on 0 Posts
What might be considered illogical are certain aspects of its implementation. The AoA vanes obviously cannot distinguish between the 'mean AoA' and the short-period fluctuation caused by turbulence. These fluctuations can be mitigated by suitably filtering the AoA signal, but that would make it less sensitive and hence increase the necessary margin between alpha-prot and alpha-max. Obviously you wouldn't want to filter out the 'real' increase of AoA that occurs when the airplane flies into the powerful updraft that some posters on this thread theorize about. The designers have made the opposite choice by applying "phase advance", which amplifies the sensitivity to turbulence. I guess you need to ask the designers to elaborate the pros and cons of their choice.
That whole statement seems to imply a much wider bandwidth and shorter time constant for a mechanical AoA sensor than ever likely. Also implies that anyone would be interested in small scale high frequency turbulence... that would be for a hot-wire anemometric device if we're into the business of looking at 'gustiness', which I'm pretty sure we aren't
HarryMann is offline