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Aerodynamics: an introduction
Have you ever ridden in an open-top car and felt the wind pushing past your face?
It's exhilarating and you feel really alive, but it's also surprising, because we don't
normally feel the air at all. Although we're surrounded by this mysterious gas, and
life is impossible without it, we hardly ever give it a moment's thought.
Understanding how air behaves when we slice through it at speed is incredibly
important: without the science of aerodynamics, as it's known, we'd never be able
to design planes or spacecraft, land-speed record cars, or bridges that can survive
hurricanes. So what exactly is aerodynamics? Let's take a closer look!
What is aerodynamics?

One of the most obvious differences

between solids, liquids, and gases is
their density: how many atoms of "stuff"
there are in a given space. Solids and
liquids are much denser than gasesand
you'll know this is if you've ever tried
walking through a swimming pool.
Compared to walking through the air, it's
incredibly hard work to propel your body
through water. You literally have to push
the water that's in front of you out of the
way; as you move forward, the water sloshes around you into the space you've just
left behind. It's much faster to swim through water than to walk through it because
you can make your body into a long, thin shape that creates less resistance: you
glide through the water more smoothly, disturbing it less, and because there's less
resistance, you can move faster.
Moving through air is much the same. Like water, air is a fluid (the name we give to
liquids and gases that can easily move, or flow) and, generally speaking, most fluids
behave the same way. If you want to speed quickly through the air, you're better off
in a long, thin vehiclesomething like a plane or a trainthat creates as little
disturbance as possible: planes and trains are tube-shaped for exactly the same
reason that we swim horizontally with our bodies laid out long and thin.

Thinking about how to move through a fluid quickly and effectively is really what
aerodynamics is all about. If we want a more formal, scientific definition, we can say
that aerodynamics is the science of how things move through air (or how air moves
around things).

The science of aerodynamics

Aerodynamics is part of a branch of physics called fluid dynamics, which is all
about studying liquids and gases that are moving. Although it can involve very
complex math, the basic principles are relatively easy-to-understand; they include
how fluids flow in different ways, what causes drag (fluid resistance), and how fluids
conserve their volume and energy as they flow. Another important idea is that when
an object moves through a stationary fluid, the science is pretty much the same as
if the fluid moved and the object were still. That's why it's possible to study the
aerodynamic performance of a car or an airplane in a wind tunnel: blasting highspeed air around a still model of a plane or car is the same as flying or driving
through the air at the same speed.

Laminar and turbulent flow

When you empty water from a plastic bottle, you've probably noticed you can do it
in two very different ways. If you tip the bottle at a shallow angle, the water comes
out very smoothly; air moves past it, in the opposite direction, filling the bottle with
"emptiness." If you tip the bottle more, or hold it vertically, the water comes out
noisily, in jerks; that's because the air and the water have to fight at the neck of the
bottle. Sometimes the water wins and rushes out, sometimes the air wins and
rushes in, briefly stopping the water flow. The fight between water exiting and air
entering gives you the characteristic "glug-glug" sound as you pour.
What we see here are the two extreme types of fluid flow. In the first case, we have
the water and the air sliding very smoothly past one another in layers, which is
called laminar flow (or streamline flow because the fluid flows in parallel lines
called streamlines). In the second case, the air and water move in a more erratic
way, which we called turbulent flow. If we're trying to design something like a
sports car, ideally we want to shape the body so the flow of air around it is as
smooth as possibleso it's laminar rather than turbulent. The more turbulence
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there is, the more air resistance the car will experience, the more energy it will
waste, and the slower it will go.

Boundary layer

The speed at which a fluid flows past an object varies according to how far from the
object you are. If you're sitting in a parked car and a gale-force wind is howling past
you at 200km/h (125mph), you might think the difference in speed between the air
and the car is 200km/hand it is! But there's not a sudden, drastic discontinuity
between the stationary car and the fast-moving air. Right next to the car, the air
speed is actually zero: the air sticks to the car because there are attractive forces
between the molecules of the car's paintwork and the air molecules that touch
them. The further away from the car you get, the higher the wind speed. A certain
distance from the car, the air will be traveling at its full speed of 200km/h. The
region surrounding the car where the air speed increases from zero to its maximum
is known as the boundary layer. We get laminar flow when the fluid can flow
efficiently, gently and smoothly increasing in speed across the boundary layer; we
get turbulent flown when this doesn't happenwhen the fluid jumbles and mixes up
chaotically instead of sliding past itself in smooth layers.
The idea of the boundary layer leads to all kinds of interesting things. It explains
why, for example, your car can be dusty and dirty even though it's racing through
the air at high speed. Although it's traveling fast, the air right next to the paintwork
isn't moving at all, so particles of dirt aren't blown away as you might expect them
to be. The same applies when you try to blow the dust off a bookshelf. You can blow
really hard, but you'll never blow all the dust away: at best, you just blow the dust
(the upper layers of dust particles) off the dust (the lower layers that stay stuck to
the shelf)! The boundary layer concept also explains why wind turbines have to be
so high. The closer to the ground you are, the lower the wind speed: at ground level,
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on something like concrete, the wind speed is actually zero. Build a wind turbine
that's way up in the sky and you're (hopefully) reaching beyond the boundary layer
to the place where the air speed is a maximum and the wind has higher kinetic
energy to drive the turbine's rotors.

Drag

Air resistancedrag, as it's usually knownfollows on from the distinction between

laminar and turbulent flow. When a sports car speeds through the air, the flow
remains relatively laminar; when a truck plows through it, there's much more
turbulence. Drag is the force that a moving body feels when the flow of air around it
starts to become turbulent. If you ride a bike or you've ever run a sprint race, it'll be
very obvious to you that drag increases with speed. But a very important point is
that it doesn't increase linearly as your speed increases but according to
the squareof your speed. In other words, if you double your speed, roughly speaking
you quadruple the drag. Fast-moving vehicles use most of their energy overcoming
drag; once you reach about 300km/h (180mph), you're using virtually all your
energy trying to push the air out of the way. This doesn't just apply to land-speed
record cars but to ordinary drivers as well: for stop-start city driving, you waste
most of your energy in braking; when you speed along on the highway, most of your
energy is being lost pushing aside the air. (To see the simple math behind this, take
a look at David MacKay's discussion in his book Sustainable Energy Without Hot Air.)

Why does drag happen? There are two types called friction drag and form drag and
they have different causes. Imagine a car sitting still as the wind speeds past it. If
the car is smoothly shaped, the air next to its paintwork isn't moving at all. The
layer just beyond that is moving a little bit, and the layer beyond that is moving a
little bit more. All these layers of air are sliding past one another in exactly the
same way that your foot might slide across the floor: they have to overcome the
mutual attraction between one another's molecules, which causes friction. Friction
drag happens because it takes energy to make layers of air slide past one another.
The rougher or more obstructive the object, the more turbulent the air flow
becomes, the greater the friction between the layers, and the greater the drag. At
low speeds, the air flows splits when it meets an object and, providing the object is
reasonably aerodynamic, flows right around it, closely following its outline. But the
faster the air flow and the less aerodynamic the object, the more the air flow breaks
away and becomes turbulent. That's what we mean by form drag.

Bernoulli's principle

Make yourself a rectangular tube of paper, put it on a table, and blow through it. As
you do so, the paper will collapse down, then spring back up again when you run
out of breath. What's happening? When a fluid flows from one place to another, it
has to conserve its energy. In other words, there has to be as much energy at the
end as there was at the start. We know this from the fundamental law of physics
called the conservation of energy, which explains that you can't create or destroy
energy, only change it from one form into another. Think about the air flowing
through your homemade tube. The air just outside the tube, just where you're
blowing, has three types of energy: potential energy, kinetic energy, and energy
because of its pressure. The air in the middle of the tube has the same three types
of energy. However, because the air is moving faster there, its kinetic energy must
be greater. Since we can't have created energy out of nothing, there must have
been a reduction in one of the other two types of energy. You're blowing straight
across a table so the air doesn't rise or falland doesn't change its potential energy.
The only place we can compensate for the extra kinetic energy is in the fluid's
pressure. As the air speeds up, its pressure goes down. Since the air inside the tube
is at a lower pressure than the air above it, the tube collapses until you stop
blowing. Stated simply, Bernoulli's principle(pronounced Bur-noo-ee's theorem)
simply reminds us that the total energy in a moving fluid is constant. But you're
likely to see it described a different way: if a fluid speeds up, its pressure goes down
(and vice-versa).

How wings really work

A lot of science books tell us that Bernoulli's principle is the key to understanding
how airfoils (curved wings on airplanes, also known as aerofoils) generate lift. The
standard explanation goes like this. As air hits an airfoil, it splits into two streams,
one of which shoots over the wing as the other dives underneath. People used to
think that a simple difference in the speed of the two air streams caused the lift on
the wing, but we now know this is wrong. The argument went like this: the upper
surface of an airfoil is curved, while the lower surface is straight. We know from the
continuity equation that there's as much air coming out from behind an airfoil wing
as there is going into it at the front. So, theoretically, the air going above the stream
has to go faster than the air going underneath it, because it has to go further.
Bernoulli's principle tells us that fast-moving air is at a lower pressure than slowermoving air, so there's less pressure above the airfoil, and this is what generates the
lift (upward force) as it travels through the air.
Unfortunately, this turns out to be false, both experimentally and in theory. With
simple experiments, we can show that a plane can fly if its airfoils have identical
upper and lower profiles (if they're symmetrical, in other words): a paper airplane
with flat wings will fly perfectly well. The theoretical explanation is also easy to
understand: we're talking about two continuous streams of air, one above and one
below the airfoil, and there's absolutely no reason why two air molecules that
separate at the front of an airfoil (one taking the upper route, one the lower) should
neatly meet up again at the back, having traveled different distances in the same
time; one molecule could easily take longer than the other and meet up with
a different air molecule at the back. The real explanation of why airfoils create lift is
down to a combination of pressure differences and Newton's third law of motion. An
airfoil wing generates lift because it's both curved and tilted back, so the oncoming
air is accelerated over the top surface and then forced downward. This creates a
region of low pressure directly above the wing, which generates lift. The wing's
tilted angle forces the air downward, and that also pushes the plane upward
(Newton's third law).

Why aerodynamics matters

Why should we care about aerodynamics? Why does it matter? Suppose you run a
haulage firm and you have 500 trucks driving around the country delivering supplies
to supermarkets. Apart from the trucks themselves and the wages of the drivers,
the biggest cost your business faces is fuel. If you fit a relatively inexpensive fairing
(a sloped piece of plastic) to the top of your trucks so the air is deflected smoothly
up and over the cargo container behind, you'll cut the fuel consumption by 1020
percent and save a huge amount of money. Fitting side-shields to the underside of
the cargo container (to stop turbulent airflow underneath them) will save more. The
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same goes for cars. Driving around with a roof-rack in place when you're carrying
nothing on it will increase the fuel you use (and the amount you have to pay in
gasoline/petrol) by about five percent. Why? Because the rack drags in the air and
slows you down.
For airplanes and space rockets, aerodynamics is even more important. When
spacecraft return to Earth, they pass from the virtual vacuum of space into Earth's
atmosphere at high speed, which heats them up dangerously; in February 2003, the
Space Shuttle Columbia was tragically destroyed, killing all seven astronauts
onboard, when it overheated on reentry. Understanding better how air moves over a
spacecraft is essential if we want to avoid such things happening in future.
Aerodynamics matters for the rest of us too. If you're a keen cyclist and you want to
win a race, you need to use your energy as efficiently possible, losing as little to the
air as you can. If you're a motorist who travels reasonably long distances on the
freeway (motorway), minimizing air resistance is one of your best ways of saving
fuel, saving money, and helping the planet.

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