Frontier Research Institute for Interdisciplinary Sciences
Tohoku University

The number of air passengers has been more than doubled during the past 20 years and is predicted to increase further in the future. The growing number of flights leads to an increased risk of accidents, as well as the impact on the global environment due to clustered condensation trails (contrails) and CO2 emissions. Therefore, the importance of aircraft and operation technologies that can achieve safe and environment-friendly flights has been increasing.

This study aims to develop technologies for realizing a low environmental impact and safe flights by the application of the large-scale fluid analysis combined with data assimilation methods to problems such as atmospheric turbulence that affect flight safety, and the formation process of contrails focusing on the interaction of the engine exhaust and wake turbulence. The interdisciplinary problems of aeronautics and meteorology are tackled by an integrated method of simulation and experiment. Since the data assimilation method is applicable to research areas performing numerical simulation and experimental measurement, I would like to explore its application to other research fields.