A fundamental principle of aeronautical engineering has been overturned
wired.com
wired.com
It always surprised me that this was not true in air and airplane wings were supposedly best when glossy. So now it turns out that this is indeed not true, and airfoils also benefit from micro-roughness for lowest friction.
Now the surprising question to me is how is it possible that something so simple was not known in this very well-researched and well-funded field. It probably was known, just not by the paper-publishing researchers.
Could be the case that in-practice this means they just worry less as their perfectly smooth planes get a bit rough.
I remember people could smoke on planes. On some airlines seat backs and bathrooms had cigarette ashtrays in them. Smoking was phased out between 1988 and 2000, with most airlines being smoke free in the mid-1990s.
But the ashtrays persisted well into the 2000s. Two reasons: they needed to refresh the cabins, which is on a longer maintenance cycle done every few years, and before that, they needed replacement seats and bathroom fittings without the ashtrays. That meant tests, regulatory approval, all sorts.
For ashtrays being removed.
Winglets are a similar story. They're an addition, but they needed test flying and type approval before they could be added to the maintenance cycle rotation and get added to aircraft.
This is a bigger change. Boeing and Airbus (and others), are going to need to design it, push it through CFD, build different variants, test fly them, get them through regulatory approval and then... well, existing aircraft are probably not going to get these. Too expensive, too hard.
What's going to make more sense is a new aircraft - even if it's a variant type like the 737-MAX or the A320-Neo or whatever - where they approve the type modification as a whole, but it's not a retrofit to an existing airframe, will help manufactures sell more aircraft, airlines don't need to ground existing fleet and over time the fuel efficiencies get involved.
Regardless of whether smoking is allowed in any other part of the airplane, lavatories must have self-contained, removable ashtrays located conspicuously on or near the entry side of each lavatory door, except that one ashtray may serve more than one lavatory door if the ashtray can be seen readily from the cabin side of each lavatory served
I don't think it's safe to generalize from this to a functional aspect of the plane. Removing the ashtrays serves no purpose, so there's no cost to letting it wait for a decade or two. Improving the aerodynamics does serve a purpose and might be done faster.
Thats the region between laminar and turbulent flow. Laminar flow is typically 5x less drag than turbulent, and will be encountered about a Reynolds number of 500K-1M (ratio of inertial flow to viscous flow).
Surfboards will have a Reynolds number of 10^7 which is entirely turbulent.
A Cessna aircraft will have a Reynolds number of 1-5x10^6.
And Lady Mondegreen.
A fin, foil or daggerboard below the board/boat is operating well within the range of Reynolds' numbers where laminar flow is relevant.
In truth there's some contamination from the upstream flow. Stabilizing elements are behind the center of pressure, so they will see the most "diry flow"
I thought this was known to some extent that smooth surfaces are not always the best e.g. golf balls have dimples on them? No?
In comparison, from my days studying aerodynamics for RC soaring, air has a wider range of "viscosities" (represented by the Reynolds number) depending on the scale of your aeroplane and the speeds you intend to go through the atmosphere. The aerodynamic ideal or what count as useful tricks (winglets, dimples) can be fairly different for a a golf ball compared to a RC airplane compared to a commercial jet compared to a fighter jet...
It’s not directly related to how the wind goes over the wings.
With sufficient thrust you can fly around in a cube.
So, to rotate faster, you need larger control surfaces.
From other side, traditionally, self-stabilize spent at least 1% of energy (on small planes normal up to 10%). What all this mean - with 10 000kg of total weight, your control surface will constantly make 1000kg of force to just fly, but when need to turn, will need significantly more than 1000kg, that's all.
Old planes need self-stabilize, because constant corrections was very time consuming, but modern have powerful computers and could provide artificial stabilization - current 1kg computer could provide same stabilization as control surface constantly making 1000kg of force.
the specific process and implemention however are usually newer or slightly different from before.
this is our sensationalistic based society - any iterative progress, or sometimes even copy, is explained as a revolution.
now show me a 737 using 40% less fuel - guess what - that wont happen - however, perhaps we'll get a slightly better process to create aircraft skins. keep in mind you cant re-sand a fuselage every week, it needs to work reliably with no maintenance.
I was an AE major and I don’t recall ever learning that airplane wings were best when perfectly smooth, even as a simplification in undergraduate courses. We were taught that drag is reduced by maintaining an attached laminar flow.
Airplane wings are glossy because they’re metal (or CFRP) and painted for durability and corrosion and UV resistance.
I’m fairly new to the sport and never heard of this yet.
Huh... I'd always heard that a golf ball's dimples help reduce drag?
and a lot of "smooth" aerodynamic surfaces have "microscopic"/"very small" surface patterns to make the surface less perfect smooth as if it is too perfect smooth the air kinda "sticks" to it increasing drag (to say it in a very unscientific way)
Yep also vortex generators in cars have become common. So common that they've filtered down to after market parts you can put on a honda civic
Vortexes break up large air pockets and reduce drag.
The less aerodynamic the vehicle, the more noticeable the result will probably be.
Between the day to day road conditions and different routes noise and the modest effect, I'd say this would be impossible to tell.
>This principle is fundamentally different from the effect of dimples on golf balls. Dimples reduce pressure resistance by intentionally turbulizing the airflow and suppressing backward separation. DMR, on the other hand, delays the transition, thereby suppressing not pressure resistance but the wall friction itself. They are opposite mechanisms.
> Subscribe to listen [9 minutes]
> Aerodynamic drag is a major “barrier” in high-speed airplanes, automobiles, and bullet trains. This is because a design with less aerodynamic drag allows the aircraft to move at higher speeds with less energy.
And then just comments and links to other articles. No indication at all that there's more to the article beyond (apparently) an audio recording.
This might explain some of the "didn't read the article" comments? Not that it doesn't happen anyway tho.
However, I did not see what the actual net improvement was. When they talk percentages, they are talking only about "in the transition zone". They say the coefficient improves throughout, but in theory, it could be almost irrelevant if the overall improvement throughout the profile is close to 0. It also sounds like a very difficult level of precise degradation to maintain for any period of time in real world conditions, since it would be easy to clog or abrade further.
Or projectiles like bullets and missiles. A sniper bullet with nanoscale textured surface that's able to go x% farther due to reduced drag seems plausible.
Deer season involves a lot of loading and unloading a rifle (for those of use without removable magazines who are also bad at finding deer), and the bullets don't come out of it appreciably worse for wear. And that's for lead-free soft annealed copper ammunition. If you aren't being aggressively careless with your ammunition, it's not getting a lot of friction and scratches.
Reads like they've discovered a neat way to delay flow separation while maintaining laminar flow, but the underlying principles have not changed. "Smooth thing low drag" was never a rule and only works at certain scales.
> This premise was based on the results of a 1940 study by Ichiro Tani, a Japanese scientist who demonstrated the relationship between surface roughness (an indicator of the state of the machined surface) and turbulent transition, arguing that surface roughness, which was unavoidable with the manufacturing technology of the time, prevented laminar flow from being realized.
> However, in 1989 Tani reinterpreted the experimental data on rough-surfaced pipes obtained by fluid engineer Johann Nikulase in the 1930s, suggesting that “roughness may not necessarily only promote turbulent transition and increase fluid resistance.”
So if true, this means that Tani was working on the same problem for 49 years.
Evidently [he died in 1990](https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q24868684), so it's at least possible.
> The ... magnetic support balance system ... can levitate a streamlined model ... inside a wind tunnel without contact using electromagnetic force.
On a similar note - How many times have you seen announcements about someones blended wing that is going to save 50% fuel? But there are very few blended wings in nature (eg. rays), and those are in a very slow-speed regime.
I'm intrigued by the methodology of the wind tunnel: using magnets to more precisely measure and to avoid interference from guy wires...
And if so, couldn’t we just have a model iterate on different surface patterns and optimize?
In a golf ball, the dimples create a turbulence in a layer of air around it but results in higher lift due to smaller vortex and less drag.
I wonder what the implications for radar-absorbing finishes are. Could they be more aerodynamic already?
A quick search looks to show the same general topic from more than a decade ago. I too have a recollection of this being discussed in the late 80s or early 90s. Maybe some folk wisdom that's just now getting quantified.
Next up: my personal wing invention which uses leading edges modeled on humpback whale fins, because the use case / stall profile is better.
Sigh, I’m going to have a great time in Heaven chatting with Leonardo da Vinci…
> This technology is fundamentally different from the “rivulet (shark skin) process,” which is known as a typical aerodynamic drag reduction technology. The rivulet process mimics the fine longitudinal grooves in shark skin, and by carving grooves approximately 0.1 mm wide along the direction of airflow, it aligns the vortices that occur near the wall surface of turbulent airflow areas. DMR, on the other hand, delays the switch from laminar to turbulent flow by means of random and minute irregularities. The flow zones it affects and the mechanisms it employs are based on completely different concepts.
you might find this video interesting then, the fastest rc drone in the world and it uses humpback inspired props.
Golf ball dimples are about 4 mm across and 0.2mm or 200μm (micrometers).
These features are several orders of magnitude smaller at 38 to 53μm diameter.
>>the first in the world to demonstrate that aerodynamic drag can be reduced by up to 43.6 percent simply by applying distributed micro-roughness (DMR), a surface roughness so fine and irregular that it cannot be distinguished by the naked eye. [...] Two types of DMRs were used in this experiment: A convex pattern made of glass beads with diameters ranging from 38 to 53 micrometers (μm) and a concave pattern applied by sandblasting. The height of the DMR coating is only 1 percent of the thickness of the boundary layer and is classified as a “smooth surface” from a hydrodynamic point of view.
Diameter-to-diameter seems like about 100x or two orders of magnitude?
Similarly, 200 μm is the golf ball dimple depth (oops, just noticed I dropped that key word), and they didn't give us a measurement of the depth of the dents caused by the spheres or sandblasting, but it would likely be significantly less than half the radius of the spheres?
Sorry about misleading with dropping the "depth" word.
''' This technology is fundamentally different from the “rivulet (shark skin) process,” which is known as a typical aerodynamic drag reduction technology. The rivulet process mimics the fine longitudinal grooves in shark skin, and by carving grooves approximately 0.1 mm wide along the direction of airflow, it aligns the vortices that occur near the wall surface of turbulent airflow areas. DMR, on the other hand, delays the switch from laminar to turbulent flow by means of random and minute irregularities. The flow zones it affects and the mechanisms it employs are based on completely different concepts. '''