SESAR JU partners demonstrated the effectiveness of a system using plate lines – parallel plates arranged one after another - to reduce wake vortices at large airports.
High up in the air, wake vortices usually descend quickly, drift away and finally dissipate. Near the ground, they can hover for some time, a short distance upstream of the runway threshold. This is exactly where subsequent aircraft finish their approach. A system of plates arranged in parallel one behind the other, referred to as a plate line, can be set up to attenuate the circulating vortices in front of a runway more quickly. Secondary vortices form on the plates, which are about nine metres long and 4.5 metres high in this test installation. This causes the wake vortices to decay much more quickly.
This solution is part of the SESAR project PJ02 EARTH "Increased Runway and Airport Throughput’" and was demonstrated in Vienna airport
