Re:Ram air turbine
by toomuchtodo on Wednesday April 06, 2016 @03:12PM
(#11441054)
You'd think the RAT would charge a battery acting as buffer. But who am I to armchair quarterback an entire aerospace industry.
Having a sufficiently large battery introduces another point of failure, something undesirable in a situation where you're already in bad shape.
You don't deploy the RAT unless shit is going sideways.
A point to stress is that the energy delivered to the plane systems by this auxiliary turbine is thus varying with the square of the speed of the plane. That means that as you slow down for landing, the RAT delivers less and less energy... and the commanding authority of the hydraulic-actuated control surface lowers, making the plane less and less controllable. Not fun!