Fluid Flow & Aerodynamics
why things fly, and why the usual explanation is wrong
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The thread: Taught wrongly, everywhere — page 20

Page 20 of 22, continuing through the 190 essays this motif runs through.

190 essays carry this thread — page 20 of 22.

Air that comes out fast makes the first pulse taller. The head at the closed valve of a 600 m main, in Joukowsky rises above its steady head, for eight round trips after the valve shuts, with the water saturated with air at atmospheric pressure. With no release the cavity is vapour and the first pulse is 1.3 rises. If all the water gives up its air slowly, over ten round trips, the gas cushions the collapse and the pulse is 1.16. If it comes out fast, in three-hundredths of one, the cavity holds the head near atmospheric pressure rather than the vapour pressure, it lasts a round trip longer, and the pulse is 1.46 — the air-cavity limit's 1.45. Fluids at work

The air a cavity releases is capped by the cavity

When a shut valve pulls the pressure behind it down, the air dissolved in the water starts to come out, and a little gas was already known to soften the hammer. But air leaves the water only while its pressure in the cavity is below the pressure the water was saturated at, so a cavity can fill with at most its own volume of air at that pressure — a seven-thousandth of the pipe here, however much water gives up its air and however fast. That is less than a third of what removes the hammer. Released quickly, the air does not cushion the collapse at all: it turns the vapour cavity into an air cavity, and the pulse becomes the column-separation pulse with the margin measured to the atmosphere — taller, on this main.

 Holding the neutral point with a canard ahead takes a tail two and a half times the size. The tail area, as a fraction of the wing's, that puts the neutral point where the tail aircraft with a tail of 0.2 has it, against the tail's height above the wing's plane in spans: with no canard, with the canard, and with the canard but its wake at the tail removed. At the reference height the tail aircraft needs 0.2; with the canard it needs 0.496, of which 0.22 is for the canard's own lift ahead of the centre of gravity and 0.077 for its wake at the tail. A tail 0.25 span up needs 0.354 with the canard and 0.154 without. Circulation and lift

The tail a canard needs costs more than the canard saves

A canard added to an aircraft as a second trimming surface saves induced drag only if the neutral point is held where it was, and holding it is not free. The canard's own lift ahead of the centre of gravity pulls the neutral point forward, its wake reaches the tail and weakens it, and the tail has to grow to put the neutral point back. For a canard of a tenth of the wing's area the tail grows two and a half times, and its skin friction is twenty to thirty counts against a saving of one to twenty. A T-tail escapes most of the wake and a third of the bill, and still only a flapped wing comes near to paying.

 A thin interface stays unstable far past a quarter. The fastest growth rate of any disturbance against the bulk Richardson number J, on a logarithmic scale, for a density interface as thick as the shear and two, two and a half and three times thinner. The matched layer's billow dies at a quarter, as Miles' theorem requires. Two times thinner, the billow dies sooner, its last growth at J = 0.12, and nothing replaces it. Three times thinner, the billow's last is at 0.08 and a travelling wave takes over: 0.0335 at a quarter, 0.0109 at one and 0.00629 at 1.3, falling steadily with no threshold in the range solved. At 2.5 the waves are weaker and reach 0.001 at 1.3. Transition and turbulence

A thin interface keeps its waves past a quarter

Miles' quarter rules a shear layer whose density changes over the same depth as its velocity. Make the density interface three times thinner and the stationary billow dies early, but a pair of travelling waves takes its place and is still growing at five times the quarter. No theorem is broken: at the edges of the shear, where the waves draw their energy, the local Richardson number has fallen to nothing.

 No elevon acts through more than a quarter of the chord. The distance behind the quarter chord at which the load an elevon adds acts — its arm — against the elevon's share of the chord. A vanishing tab at the trailing edge has an arm of exactly a quarter chord; a tenth-chord elevon 0.217, a fifth 0.185, a third 0.145, half 0.0972, and a flap of the whole chord, which is simply a change of incidence, none. However far aft the hinge, the deflection loads the whole chord and most of the load sits near the leading edge. Circulation and lift

No elevon reaches past a quarter chord

A wing with no tail trims itself with the back of its own section, and the back of a section is a short lever. Thin-aerofoil theory prices it exactly: the load an elevon adds acts at most a quarter of a chord behind the quarter-chord point, however small and far aft the elevon is. So every unit of trim moment costs at least four units of lift, where a tail three chords back costs a third, and a camber change shaped as a pure couple would cost nothing.

 The entrance grows with the Péclet number, peaks, and then shrinks. The distance from a wall-temperature step at which the local Nusselt number has come within 5 per cent of its developed value, in diameters, against the Péclet number, for turbulent pipes at Reτ = 500, 1000, 2000 and 5000, with the slug's laminar line L/D = 0.029·Pe. The liquid metals sit on the line; the entrance peaks at 11.6 diameters at Pe ≈ 4700 for Reτ = 1000 and falls to about three and a half diameters for water. Regimes and numbers

The longest thermal entrance belongs to neither metal nor gas

A liquid metal carries its heat across a turbulent pipe by conduction, as a laminar flow would, and so its thermal entrance should be long. It is long only when its Péclet number is large. Below a few hundred the entrance grows in proportion to the Péclet number with the constant of a fluid moving as a solid block, and it leaves that scaling close to the threshold at which the eddies first match conduction. The longest entrance in a turbulent pipe belongs to the fluids between the metals and the gases, and how long it is depends on a number the measurements have never pinned down.

 A wake throws a following cylinder out to the side, and the pair still meets. One cylinder's centre relative to the other's, the stream from left to right, for pairs released six radii apart at 2°, 5°, 10° and 20° from tandem at Re = 200. Without wakes (faint) the near-tandem pairs drift apart, out to 13 radii, before the drag lets the turn bring them in. With wakes the follower first drafts in, is thrown sideways out of the leader's wake, and never gets beyond 6.26 radii. Every pair touches, near side by side. Ideal flow

A trailing wake hurries a pair together

Two cylinders free in a stream and damped by their drag always end up meeting near side by side, and the obvious candidate for what holds real pairs apart is their wakes: a body beside another's wake is pushed towards the faster fluid, away from it. Give each cylinder a wake that carries its drag and the push is there — but it points the wrong way. It throws a following cylinder out of the leader's wake and round towards side by side, where neither is in the other's wake and nothing opposes the stream's pull. Near tandem the wakes make the pair meet seven to sixty times sooner, and the only balance they create is a saddle.

 Elasticity adds a spring at first order and a slip only at second. The damping's deficit, one minus the damping ratio, and the in-phase force against Λ on logarithmic axes. The in-phase force rises in proportion to Λ — a fitted slope of 1.0000 — and the damping's deficit as its square, 2.0000. A slip length changes the damping at first order and adds no spring at all, so a soft wall and a slipping one are distinct in kind: the soft wall announces itself first in the phase of the force. What is taught wrongly

A soft wall is read as slip only at second order

A drainage force smaller than Taylor's has been read as the liquid slipping at the wall. A wall that gives under the drainage pressure lowers the force too, and it can be mistaken for slip. Solved together, the flow and the elastic wall say how: the softness first adds a spring to the force, in phase with the motion, and only at second order takes anything from the damping a slip length is read from. When it does, the slip it imitates grows as the square of the frequency and falls as the square of the gap.

 The pocket escapes at the least pressure its states can stand. The liquid pressure each equilibrium of the pocket needs, against the pocket's volume, for a crevice with a one-micrometre mouth in a wall the water wets at 40° and one it does not, at 110°. As the crown's pressure falls the pocket follows its curve to the right: the rim slides out of the cone, pins at the mouth, and the meniscus bulges into a cap. The curve's minimum is the escape threshold — -106 kPa for the wetting wall and -138 kPa for the non-wetting one — and below it no state exists: the pocket becomes a cavity. What is taught wrongly

A crevice keeps the nucleus a free bubble loses

A free bubble at a siphon's crown dissolves in milliseconds, so it cannot be what breaks a siphon that has run for an hour. A pocket of gas in a crack of the hose wall can be, because its meniscus is curved by the wall and need not dissolve. Followed through its equilibria, the pocket escapes at a tension set almost entirely by the crack's mouth. What the wall's wettability decides is slower and more consequential: whether the crack fills, or keeps drawing gas in until the siphon breaks.

 Heading into the sea, follow the long waves and fly level through the short. The dinghy's mean drag against the crossover encounter frequency below which it follows the surface, in units of the sea's peak frequency, heading into seas of significant height 0.2, 0.4 and 0.6 m. Following everything — the right-hand end — costs the heave's lift, and flying level through everything — the left — costs the foil's swinging depth and, in the roughest sea, breaches. Between them each sea has a best crossover: for 0.4 m at 2.92 times the peak frequency, 67.6 N against 67.9 flying level and 199 following. Fluids at work

A foil in a random sea follows it up to its peak

In a regular wave a foiling boat chooses between holding its height and following the surface. A real sea is a spectrum, and a wand that filters its signal can do both at once: follow the long waves and fly level through the short. The best place to divide them is close to the frequency of the sea's own peak, the divided control beats either pure strategy, and in a rough sea it is the only one of the three that keeps the foil a safe distance under the surface and the drag near its calm-water value.

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