An Introduction to 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

Mathematics is central to all engineering disciplines, including aerospace engineering. After all, it underpins every computation that allows aerospace engineers to better understand physical situations and optimize aircraft designs. Therefore, it is worth dedicating a week to discuss math.  The first main topic of this discussion is calculus, which has two central … [Read more...] about The Mathematics of Aerospace Engineering

Fluid mechanics has been notoriously difficult to understand. This is primarily because the fundamental equations that describe fluid flow, the Navier-Stokes equations, can be nearly impossible to solve. In the year 2000, the Clay Mathematics Institute offered $1 million to the first person who could prove the existence of well-behaved solutions to the Navier-Stokes equations … [Read more...] about Unlocking the Secrets of Fluid Mechanics: Oil Film Flow Visualization and More