Technology
Broadband wavelength absorption panels, a new concept for the electric air taxi era
Aeroberm is a modular, elevated steel vertipad system with proprietary broadband wavelength absorption surface panels. The geometry is designed to diffuse rotor downwash and outwash up to ninety percent faster so wind-speed thresholds surrounding the pad can more quickly be reduced to the 34.5mph required for safety by the Federal Aviation Administration.
The choice is quite simple, to achieve downwash/outwash safety you either provide a large safety area around a vertipad, or you utilise the Aeroberm to safely shrink that space, saving significantly on capital costs.
“The animation shows computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations of airflow representing the flow generated by an electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft during landing, viewed from the side across four surface configurations. The swirling flow structures, known as vortices, are produced by the aircraft's rotors and propagate outward across the landing surface as outwash. The colour field represents the rotational intensity of the flow, with blue and red indicating opposing directions of rotation. The fractal panel demonstrates the most aggressive breakdown of the coherent vortex train, redirecting and dispersing the outwash more effectively than any other configuration tested”.
Professor Justin Leontini
Swinburne University
Fractal surface, vortex dissipation
The fractal surface intercepts and dissipates rotor wake energy, significantly reducing the blast hazard to people, vehicles and nearby structures. Greater viscous dissipation of airflows translates to safer vertiports on smaller footprints.
How the patented fractal panel actually works (without an engineering degree)
When an air taxi lands, its rotors blast powerful spinning columns of air downward and outward, fast enough to scatter debris, knock over people, and make urban landings genuinely dangerous. The problem is that aircraft produce vortices in many different sizes at once, and conventional surfaces designed to handle one size simply ignore the rest. Aeroberm's fractal panel solves this with a mathematically self-similar arrangement of vanes, a pattern that repeats at every scale simultaneously, so there is always a feature the right size to intercept whatever vortex arrives. As the air travels across the surface, the panel strips out energy, destabilises the spinning columns so they break apart rapidly, and steers the remaining flow downward rather than letting it race outward at ground level. The result: dangerous outwash is broken up, weakened, and redirected.