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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?
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).
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
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).
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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