An Introduction to Flight

For my last blog post of the semester, I thought I would give a brief history of my interest in aviation.  The story begins when I was four or five years old when my parents would take me to airports to watch planes take off and land. I remember being fascinated by the concept of a metal human creation lifting off the ground and traveling between continents at hundreds … [Read more...] about A Brief Interlude: How I Became Passionate about Aviation

Gliders are airplanes without engines, and they have been commonplace in the aviation industry for more than 120 years. Indeed, gliders predated the 1903 Wright Flyer. They are also nice, relatively simple planes that freshmen aerospace engineering students can investigate.  My Introduction to Aerospace Engineering class had its own glider project last semester, and I … [Read more...] about Gliding Flight

Last week, we saw how we can approximate an airplane’s lift coefficient at any small angle of attack. Now, we can zoom in on drag, looking at how the drag coefficient depends on the lift coefficient and how this information can further inform aerospace engineers on how to design planes.  It turns out that an airplane's drag coefficient, CD, has a quadratic relationship … [Read more...] about Lift and Drag: A Deeper Dive Part 2

We know from previous posts that lift keeps an airplane aloft, while drag acts against an airplane’s direction of motion, thereby impeding its ability to fly. However, we can deepen our understanding of lift and drag by exploring the following concepts.  The only forces in a fluid are pressure forces and shear forces. In the case of an airplane wing flying through air, … [Read more...] about Lift and Drag: A Deeper Dive Part 1

When trying to solve a problem, it can be useful to examine a very simplified case of that problem. Then, solutions to that simple case can be leveraged to solve increasingly complex cases until the final, most complicated case is solved. We can employ this strategy to investigate fluid flow.   When first trying to understand how fluids work, one simplification … [Read more...] about Unlocking the Secrets of Fluid Mechanics #2: Viscosity, Boundary Layers, and Turbulence