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Essays arrive in groups rather than one at a time. The most recent group is below in full, and every earlier one after it, newest first.

Essays arrive in groups rather than one at a time, and a group usually opens up a subject not covered before. Between one group and the next nothing changes, so a reader who has seen the most recent group has seen everything.

30 October 2026

16 essays on fluids at work, transition and turbulence, ideal flow, flows and fields, viscosity, circulation and lift, what is taught wrongly, compressible flow and regimes and numbers

A travelling bubble's B-factor grows as the square root of its age, and the bubble turns heat-limited when it reaches B*. The vapour a growing bubble has made over the liquid it has cooled, against its age, in water at 80 °C under a tension 10 kPa below the vapour pressure, while inertia limits its growth; the dashed line is B, at which the cooling would use up the whole tension. B is 4.3 at a microsecond and 136 at a millisecond, and meets B = 31.6 at 53.8 µs, when its radius is 0.141 mm. Fluids at work

A bubble is throttled by its age, and a sheet by its length

A cavity cools the liquid it boils, and the cooling lowers the vapour pressure it needed. Whether that matters was a question about one number, the B-factor — vapour made over liquid cooled — and no real cavity's was known. Computed, the two kinds a pump has are nothing alike. A travelling bubble cools a thin shell that thins further as it stretches, so its B grows as the square root of its age and reaches the critical value at Brennen's thermal time: a millisecond in water at 60 °C, four microseconds at the boiling point. An attached sheet keeps renewing the liquid it cools, so its B is a few, fixed by its length and speed. In warm water the bubbles are suppressed forty degrees before the sheet.

6 figures
The second gradient separates the layer soonest after a short release, latest after a dozen thicknesses, and sooner again after a long one. The distance past the second gradient's start at which the layer separates, in its thickness there, against the release's length in the thickness at the first release: Green's lagged layer, the same layer restarted at the second gradient with no memory, and the shape-only layer. Lagged: 2.91 after no release, 5.07 after 12 thicknesses, 3.95 after 60; with no memory, 3.16, 4.81 and 3.91. Transition and turbulence

A layer's memory of one gradient helps it through the next, unless the next comes too soon

A turbulent layer released from an adverse gradient keeps the gradient's eddies for a dozen thicknesses, entraining more than its shape asks. Decelerate it again before they fade — behind the next compressor stage, or past a flap — and the question is whether that memory helps or hurts. Both, depending on when. A second gradient that arrives within about three thicknesses of the release meets a layer whose entrainment is still catching up, and it separates eight per cent sooner than a layer of the same shape with no history. One that arrives later meets eddies still working from the first gradient, and the layer holds on up to five per cent longer. The crossing sits at three thicknesses for every pair of gradients tried.

6 figures
On a NACA section thickness multiplies the lift by more than on a Joukowski section, by nearly one plus its thickness. The lift of a NACA four-digit section by panels over thin-aerofoil theory's, against its thickness: the 2412-type at 4°, and the symmetric section's lift slope over 2π; beside the Joukowski law 1 + 0.77 t/c. At 12 per cent the cambered section's factor is 1.115 and the symmetric slope's 1.101, against Joukowski's 1.092; at 18 per cent, 1.174 and 1.152. Ideal flow

A NACA section multiplies its lift by nearly one plus its thickness, and a nose correction cannot supply it

On Joukowski's exact sections, thickness — which lifts nothing alone — multiplies the lift of camber and incidence by 1 + 0.77 t/c. Solved by panels, the NACA four-digit sections that real wings use do more: their lift slope grows as about 1 + 0.84 t/c, and a cambered 2412 lifts 11.5 per cent more than thin-aerofoil theory says. The more of the thickness sits near the nose, the more it multiplies. Added as thin-aerofoil theory adds them, the parts lose a quarter of the suction peak and put the centre of pressure two hundredths of the chord too far aft. Riegels's nose factor, the classical repair, makes the nose speed finite and moves the peak, and adds no lift at all: the missing lift is not a nose effect.

6 figures
A stagnation point hangs above the skin friction's saddle while the saddle is a separation, and is gone once it is not. Streamlines in the plane y = 0 of a wall flow with no axis of symmetry, at μ = 0.4: the wall's saddle of skin friction at x = -0.632, its node at 0.632. An interior stagnation point sits at height 0.15 above x = −0.5, and the saddle is a separation: the flow leaves the wall there. Flows and fields

A stagnation point off the axis can land only on a saddle or a node, and turns it inside out

In a swirling flow onto a plate every stagnation point lived on the axis, so one sinking to the wall always met the wall's single critical point. Without the symmetry it might seem free to land anywhere — on an ordinary stretch of skin-friction line, leaving a pair of new points behind. It cannot. Divided by the height, the velocity is continuous down to the wall, where it becomes the skin friction, so a point can only reach the wall where the skin friction already vanishes. It lands on a saddle or a node, and the count does the rest: the point it lands on turns from separation to attachment. An oil-flow picture of the wall, which shows the same pattern before and after, cannot tell which it is looking at.

5 figures
Along a block's wall the pressure stagnates at each foot and plunges at each lip; between two lips close together it never recovers. The pressure coefficient along the wall unrolled, against the distance from the front foot in block heights: up the front face, along the top, down the back, for a block as long as it is tall and one six times as long; the lips' suction is infinite in ideal flow and is drawn to −6. On the cube-like block the pressure at the middle of its top is -1.89; on the long one, -0.365. Ideal flow

A block's front face is pulled upstream by its own lip

A forward-facing step's face is pushed at its foot and pulled at its lip by exactly equal amounts. Give the step a back — make it a block on the floor — and the balance goes. The two lips, a short top apart, each sit in the other's fast flow, and the suction at the front lip grows while the push at the foot hardly changes: a block as long as it is tall has its front face pulled upstream by three tenths of the dynamic pressure times its height, a block a quarter as long by two thirds. The back is pulled downstream by exactly as much, so the ideal block still has no drag; but every force that ideal flow assigns is now on the wrong face for separation to undo.

6 figures
Kicked at ninety per cent of its peak flow, the compressor is held only when both modes have an actuator. The flow through the compressor, as a fraction of the peak flow, after a stall cell of amplitude 0.05 is started at 90 per cent of the peak flow, at B = 2, under four controllers: a tip injector of gain 0.7 and capacity 2 per cent of the peak flow with the throttle fixed; the injector with a pressure-driven throttle; the pressure-and-flow throttle with no injector; and both. injector, throttle fixed: surges or runs away; injector, pressure throttle: surges or runs away; throttle pair, no injector: stalls; injector and throttle pair: recovers. Fluids at work

A compressor needs one actuator for each way it can fail

A throttle alone cannot hold a compressor left of its peak in a large plenum: it has one degree of freedom and the machine has two ways to fail, and the throttle's own surge gain runs into a ceiling that the plenum's size does not move. Give the stall cell its own actuator — air injected at the rotor tips against the cell — and give the throttle a second signal, the flow, and a machine at B = 2 is held at ninety per cent of its peak flow, recovering from a kicked cell nearly three times the injector's capacity. Let the injection lag the cell by a radian and the line still holds, but almost no disturbance is survived.

6 figures
A sphere two per cent larger overtakes its neighbour round a path that is its own mirror image, and leaves at the offset it came in at. The centre of a sphere two per cent larger than its neighbour, relative to the smaller sphere, as it overtakes it in a viscous liquid, from four horizontal offsets; the circle is the distance at which they would touch. Each path bulges outward as it passes and is symmetric about the smaller sphere's level: from 0.85, 1.5, 2.5, 4 radii the larger sphere leaves at 0.8499, 1.5, 2.5, 4, after closest approaches of 2.27, 2.83, 3.74, 5.15 radii. Viscosity

A larger sphere overtakes its neighbour and leaves on the line it came in on

Two equal spheres settling together never change their shape. Make one of them two per cent larger and the pair becomes an encounter: the larger sphere sinks past the smaller round a path that bulges out and comes back, slowed sixteenfold at contact but never stopped, and it leaves at exactly the offset it arrived with. The smaller sphere swings seven radii sideways while the larger is above it and gives every radius back while the larger is below. In Stokes flow, meeting a neighbour displaces nothing — unless the spheres touch, and a hundredth of a radius of roughness is enough to make every touching path leave on the same line.

6 figures
Inboard the spar is sized by its load, outboard by a stiffness floor its load cannot lower. The spar's weight per unit span along the semi-span, as a share of the payload's weight per unit of the reference span, at the best wing when the stiffness floor is 0.4: the weight the bending moment needs, and the floor. The floor governs the outer 53.1 per cent of the semi-span; the best loading has a third-harmonic ratio of -0.0993 and the spar is 32.1 per cent of the lift. Circulation and lift

A stiffness floor keeps the span and gives the tips their load back

A spar sized by strength alone thins to nothing at the tips, and charged as lift it stops the best span where it weighs a quarter of everything the wing carries, with the tips a little unloaded. A real outer wing is sized by stiffness, and stiffness sets a floor under the spar's weight that no reduction of the tip load can lower. Put that floor in and the tips get their load back — the best loading slides from a sixth of the way to the bell towards the ellipse — the quarter does not survive, rising to two fifths as the floor spreads over the outer two thirds of the span, and the span itself barely moves. A weight per metre cannot stop a span.

6 figures
An oval that sheds its fluid is braked less, so the pair sinks further and stops later, until it sheds too fast to stop at all. The depth of a trailing vortex pair below its starting level, in spacings, against time in spacings over its initial speed, in air of N = 0.22: Saffman's oval, which keeps its fluid, and one detraining with α = 0.05. Saffman's stops at depth 6.75 after 10.6; this one at 6.93 after 12.4. What is taught wrongly

A wake that sheds its fluid sinks further, and past a point does not stop

In stable air the pair of trailing vortices behind a wing carries a column of lighter air down with it, and buoyancy pushes the column back until the pair has given up its momentum and stops. That picture keeps every parcel of the column. A real pair sheds the light air as it sinks, and shedding does two things at once: it takes away part of the momentum the buoyancy had to return, and it takes away the buoyancy that was returning it. The second wins. A pair that sheds a little stops later and deeper; one that sheds faster than a threshold loses its column before buoyancy can stop it. The shed air keeps a quarter of the momentum swinging up and down behind the aeroplane.

6 figures
At its design Mach number the biplane's channel lifts nothing: all its lift is on the two outer faces. The lift coefficient of the pair at 2° incidence against Mach number, per unit of one element's chord, beside what the two outer faces give alone, 4α/β, and two isolated flat plates, 8α/β. At the design Mach number, 1.944, the pair's lift is 0.08378 and the outer faces' 0.08378: the channel's net lift is zero to rounding. At Mach 1.7 the channel adds 13.9 per cent, at 2.2 21.1. Compressible flow

Busemann's biplane lifts only on its outer faces, and its channel turns the lift into a quarter-chord load

Tilt Busemann's biplane to make it lift and the same cancellation that removed its wave drag removes the lift of its channel: at the design Mach number the waves the incidence sends across the gap meet and cancel just as the thickness's did, and every bit of lift is carried by the two outer faces — half what two separate plates would give. The channel does not go idle. It carries a couple, lift on the front half and download on the rear, which moves the centre of pressure from mid-chord, where every supersonic plate has it, to the quarter chord. The pair pays for its lift two and a half times as steeply as flat plates do, and still beats a diamond fourfold.

7 figures
A flicker of a few per cent empties the suspension band and drains Stommel's traps more slowly. The share of a cloud released over one cell that is still within four cells of its start after the run, against the flicker's standard deviation as a fraction of the cells' mean strength, with a memory of three turnovers: inertialess particles falling at 0.3 of the cells' speed in still air, held in Stommel's traps, and particles of Stokes number 3 falling at 0.1, held in the suspension band. Stommel's traps hold 0.52, 0.41, 0.33, 0.16, 0.03, 0; the suspension band 0.22, 0.055, 0.015, 0.015, 0.005, 0, at flickers of 0, 0.05, 0.1, 0.2, 0.35, 0.5. Regimes and numbers

Flickering vortices cannot hold a settling particle up, and still make it fall faster

A steady lattice of vortices can do two things to a heavy particle settling through it: hold it up, on closed paths or on orbits of its own, and speed its fall, by flinging it into the down-draughts. Let the vortices strengthen and fade at random, as real eddies do, and the two come apart. A flicker of five per cent of the cells' strength empties three quarters of the band of particles held up by their inertia; a flicker of a third drains Stommel's traps almost entirely. The speed-up hardly notices a flicker of a tenth, and is halved only when the cells swing by half their strength and remember it for a few turnovers. Trapping needs a steady cell; the speed-up does not.

5 figures
Surges merge down the chute until about four hundred time units, and then the train stops merging. The number of surges on a periodic chute 200 units long against time, after uniform flow at Froude number 3 is seeded with depth noise, at two resolutions, eddy viscosity 0.05. At the finer the count is 71, 55, 45, 45, 45 at times 100, 200, 400, 700 and 1000 — a spacing of 4.44; at the coarser, 63, 45, 32, 30, 30, a spacing of 6.67. Flows and fields

Roll waves stop merging at a spacing their fronts choose

On a steep chute the uniform flow breaks into a train of surges, and the train coarsens: a taller surge runs faster, catches the one ahead and swallows it, so the spacing grows down the chute. If the merging never stopped, the spacing in a photograph would only record how far the water had come. Marched down a long channel from noise, it stops. After a few hundred units of travel the surges stop catching each other and the train keeps its spacing for as long as it is followed. The spacing it keeps is not set by the chute or the noise but by the dissipation inside the surge fronts — which is the one part of the flow the shallow-water equations describe only roughly.

5 figures
Through the transitional range Nikuradse's sand pipe runs below Colebrook's curve by up to a fifth. The friction factor against the Reynolds number for a pipe of relative roughness 1/120, with Nikuradse's roughness function and with Colebrook's, beside the smooth pipe. Nikuradse's falls furthest below Colebrook's, 21.9 per cent, at a Reynolds number of 11318, where the roughness is 6 wall units; both reach 0.0356 when fully rough. Transition and turbulence

Sand and a commercial pipe part company at six wall units

A rough wall shifts the logarithmic velocity profile down by an amount that depends on the roughness height in wall units, and once the wall is fully rough every kind of roughness shifts it the same way. Before that they disagree. Nikuradse's uniform sand stays smooth until its grains reach four wall units and then rises steeply; Colebrook's commercial pipes feel grains a fifth of a wall unit high and rise smoothly. Put both into one log law and the friction factor of a pipe through its transitional range differs by up to a quarter, always at the same roughness in wall units, about six. The Moody chart, drawn from Colebrook, is the upper of the two.

5 figures
A five per cent distortion gives six blades a tone that no longer falls with the tip's speed, and two blades hardly notice. The sound power of the blade-passing fundamental against tip Mach number, thrust and shaft power held, for two and six blades: from the steady load, and from the thrust's fluctuation as each blade cuts an inflow distortion of 5 per cent rms. At tip Mach 0.4 six blades give 100 dB from the steady load and 113 from the distortion; two blades 127 and 109. The six-bladed steady tone overtakes its distortion tone at tip Mach 0.593. Compressible flow

A distorted inflow gives back the tone more blades took away

A propeller's steady thrust sings through a Bessel function whose order is the number of blades times the harmonic, and that function is exponentially small at low tip speeds — which is why six blades are quieter than two. But a blade that cuts a non-uniform inflow carries a thrust that changes round the circle, and its s-th harmonic radiates through a Bessel function of order six minus s. The sixth needs no tip speed at all. A distortion of five per cent turns six blades' tone into one that hardly falls as the tips slow, fills the axis where the steady tone is silent, and cuts the six-blade advantage over two from twenty decibels to thirteen. Two blades never notice.

6 figures
Pressed with one load, a steeper blade leaves a thinner film, and without a land a steep one cannot float at all. The film a loaded scraper leaves on the surface, in micrometres, against the angle its face makes with the surface, at a load of 100 N per metre of span on an ink of 0.1 Pa·s moving at 5 m/s: with a flat land 0.1 mm long under the edge, and with none. With the land the film is 110 µm at 10°, 1.69 at 30° and 0.268 at 60°. Without one it is the whole gap, 145 µm at 8°, and above 44° the gap the load needs is below a ten-thousandth of a nanometre: the edge is in contact. Viscosity

A pressed blade floats on its land and leaves half the gap behind

A scraper or a doctor blade is not held at a gap; it is pressed on with a load, and it rises until the liquid it lets through carries that load. Without a flat land under its edge the liquid can carry it only through the corner's logarithm, so the gap falls exponentially with the load, and a blade steeper than about forty-four degrees cannot float at a working load at all — its edge is in contact. Give it a land a tenth of a millimetre long and the film becomes half the gap, falls as one over the load, and is a quarter of a micrometre at sixty degrees. The land is also why a blade's film grows as its edge wears.

6 figures
A strut two fifths of the way out halves the spars of a box wing; near the root or the tip it buys little. The flange volume of both spars of Prandtl's best box at a gap of a fifth of the span, with one strut on each side joined rigidly to both spars, over the volume with none, against the strut's station as a fraction of the semi-span, for struts a tenth as stiff in bending as a spar, as stiff, and ten times stiffer. For a strut as stiff as a spar the least is 0.5 at 0.4 of the semi-span; at 0.1 and 0.9 it is 0.839 and 0.929. Circulation and lift

A strut inside a box wing is invisible to the wake, and halves the spar

Prandtl's best box wing has, everywhere inside it, air moving straight down: no sideways flow at all. A strut joining its two wings anywhere along the span therefore meets no flow it could turn, carries no load, and leaves the induced drag exactly where it was — the wake cannot see it. The spar can. A strut two fifths of the way out, as stiff as a spar and rigidly joined, halves the flange material of both spars, though it is pushed and pulled by almost nothing: the two wings lift equally and bend together, so the strut works through its joints, and a pinned one does nothing. Its only aerodynamic price is friction, and a slim strut pays it.

6 figures

Before that

Everything published earlier, newest first. Titles only — the cards are on the full listing.

25 October 2026

18 essays on flows and fields, viscosity, fluids at work, ideal flow, compressible flow, what is taught wrongly, regimes and numbers, circulation and lift and transition and turbulence

21 October 2026

18 essays on flows and fields, viscosity, ideal flow, fluids at work, compressible flow, transition and turbulence, circulation and lift, regimes and numbers and what is taught wrongly

19 October 2026

20 essays on ideal flow, transition and turbulence, regimes and numbers, what is taught wrongly, flows and fields, fluids at work, viscosity, compressible flow and circulation and lift

14 October 2026

19 essays on ideal flow, regimes and numbers, flows and fields, what is taught wrongly, transition and turbulence, viscosity, circulation and lift, compressible flow and fluids at work

5 October 2026

20 essays on viscosity, what is taught wrongly, fluids at work, transition and turbulence, regimes and numbers, ideal flow, flows and fields, circulation and lift and compressible flow

2 October 2026

20 essays on transition and turbulence, flows and fields, what is taught wrongly, fluids at work, ideal flow, circulation and lift, viscosity, regimes and numbers and compressible flow

30 September 2026

20 essays on transition and turbulence, what is taught wrongly, flows and fields, viscosity, circulation and lift, fluids at work, ideal flow, regimes and numbers and compressible flow

28 September 2026

20 essays on what is taught wrongly, regimes and numbers, viscosity, flows and fields, transition and turbulence, ideal flow, circulation and lift, fluids at work and compressible flow

26 September 2026

20 essays on what is taught wrongly, ideal flow, transition and turbulence, viscosity, circulation and lift, flows and fields, compressible flow, fluids at work and regimes and numbers

25 September 2026

19 essays on circulation and lift, viscosity, transition and turbulence, flows and fields, fluids at work, ideal flow, what is taught wrongly, regimes and numbers and compressible flow

24 September 2026

18 essays on fluids at work, flows and fields, compressible flow, viscosity, circulation and lift, transition and turbulence, what is taught wrongly, ideal flow and regimes and numbers

23 September 2026

16 essays on flows and fields, circulation and lift, what is taught wrongly, ideal flow, regimes and numbers, transition and turbulence, viscosity, fluids at work and compressible flow

19 September 2026

20 essays on viscosity, transition and turbulence, what is taught wrongly, compressible flow, regimes and numbers, fluids at work, flows and fields, circulation and lift and ideal flow

17 September 2026

17 essays on what is taught wrongly, flows and fields, fluids at work, regimes and numbers, compressible flow, circulation and lift, transition and turbulence and ideal flow

15 September 2026

9 essays on transition and turbulence, viscosity and compressible flow

14 September 2026

18 essays on compressible flow, what is taught wrongly, flows and fields, fluids at work, transition and turbulence and regimes and numbers

12 September 2026

20 essays on what is taught wrongly, fluids at work, flows and fields, compressible flow and transition and turbulence

10 September 2026

20 essays on what is taught wrongly, fluids at work, flows and fields and compressible flow

5 September 2026

50 essays on what is taught wrongly, flows and fields, fluids at work, compressible flow, transition and turbulence, viscosity, regimes and numbers, circulation and lift and ideal flow

3 September 2026

20 essays on what is taught wrongly, fluids at work, flows and fields, compressible flow, transition and turbulence, regimes and numbers, viscosity, circulation and lift and ideal flow

1 September 2026

20 essays on what is taught wrongly, fluids at work, flows and fields, compressible flow, transition and turbulence, viscosity, regimes and numbers, circulation and lift and ideal flow

31 August 2026

20 essays on transition and turbulence, flows and fields, ideal flow and viscosity

30 August 2026

20 essays on regimes and numbers and circulation and lift

29 August 2026

20 essays on flows and fields and compressible flow

24 August 2026

15 essays on regimes and numbers and transition and turbulence

22 August 2026

15 essays on flows and fields, what is taught wrongly, transition and turbulence, ideal flow, viscosity, compressible flow and circulation and lift

21 August 2026

15 essays on flows and fields, regimes and numbers, what is taught wrongly, ideal flow, viscosity, compressible flow and circulation and lift

20 August 2026

15 essays on what is taught wrongly and circulation and lift

19 August 2026

15 essays on flows and fields, regimes and numbers, viscosity, ideal flow, circulation and lift, transition and turbulence and compressible flow

18 August 2026

15 essays on what is taught wrongly and fluids at work

16 August 2026

15 essays on what is taught wrongly, regimes and numbers, flows and fields, viscosity, ideal flow, circulation and lift, transition and turbulence and compressible flow

15 August 2026

15 essays on fluids at work

13 August 2026

15 essays on transition and turbulence and viscosity

11 August 2026

15 essays on compressible flow, what is taught wrongly and regimes and numbers

4–10 August 2026

46 essays on what is taught wrongly, regimes and numbers, flows and fields, ideal flow, viscosity and circulation and lift

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