The Volcanic Ash
Whilst millions of people are stuck in foreign countries due to a volcano issuing enough ash to last Europe for a life time, I’m sure some of you might be thinking why you should stop the aeroplanes flying through it. I mean “it’s only a bit of cloud”, and “planes normally fly through clouds anyways”. Well the honest reason is because there is one fundamental difference between normal clouds and this ash cloud. Your everyday cloud that you see is water vapour that has condensed. This is essentially harmless to the jet engine that has to fly through them. However, the ash cloud from any volcano is a mixture of sulphur dioxide and shards of glass, which if it gets through to the engines, have a devastating effect. It clogs up the engine causing it to backfire and ultimately flame out if enough of it is in the compression chamber. Like the crew of British Airways flight 009 will tell you. They were unfortunate to cross an ash cloud above Indonesia in 1982, as a result all 4 of their engines had failed. Not a pleasant thing to happen especially if you were in a jumbo jet flying high above the Indian Ocean. Fortunately they did survive, most of the ash that had clogged up the engine had broken away, allowing the engines to restart and the jet had successfully landed in Jakarta.
Well this sounds all too bad for the airline industry when jets encounter things like this that is why most of Europe’s airspace is closed, but there always is an upside or in this case many upsides to this horrific tale. The sunsets seen in the UK for the last few days have been amazing, at least 1000 tonnes of carbon dioxide have been saved from going into the atmosphere everyday, people around Heathrow are extremely happy because they can “open their windows without worrying about an annoying sound” and last but not least (this is a personal reason) a few of my lectures have been cancelled because two of my lecturers are stuck abroad and so are international students who have gone home to visit; as a result all of my deadlines have been extended by a week. That’s why I’ve been writing this.
Somji that was a great first article. This article fell right into your area of expertise. One point of interest to me was the effect of the shards of glass on the actual engine, the fact that they disrupt the engine in such a way, as to make it imperfect is amazing. The turbine blades themselves are made so very accurately made that a millimeter layer of any sort can disrupt the airflow and so cause the engine to fail. In this particular case, the layer is that of melted glass, which fuses onto the blade. If the engine is allowed to cool in any way or form, this glassy layer will solidify and fall of, allowing the engine to restart. Now, in 1982 this was put into practice whilst the aircraft was plummeting downwards engineless, this form of solidification of pulverised rock can now and should now be researched, so as to develop a cooling mechanism without the need for an aircraft to vertically fall. So back to you, from an aeronautics student do you think this process could be viably researched? Thanks.
Very informative post, and the comment above goes to show how precise the making of an aircraft has to be, in order to deal with the inevitable. Another key thing to take from the Volcanic Ash is the impact it has had on the world. It brought the whole of Europe to an absolute halt, and shows how our power and ability can be limited by the greater force of nature.
Just had a brainwave. The BNP & The Icelandic Volcanoe Party should merge. It’s obvious that their goals are aligned.
Azeem