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The thread: A smooth picture proves nothing — page 35

Page 35 of 35, continuing through the 309 essays this motif runs through.

309 essays carry this thread — page 35 of 35.

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.

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.

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

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.

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