An aerodynamically perfect wing would have laminar flow from its leading edge all the way to the rear.
As a result, roughly half the fuel required to maintain a level cruise is being burned to overcome the drag imposed by a turbulent boundary layer.Understanding what causes the transition from laminar to turbulent flow requires massive mathematical and computing power.
But if Dr Serghides's colleague Philip Hall and his team can work out the details, they should be able to design wings whose shape maintains laminar flow from front to back, and thus lowers fuel consumption.Another engineer at Imperial, Dominic von Terzi, proposes to go even further than that.
Counter-intuitively, forcing the boundary layer of air passing over the surface of a ball in flight to flip from smooth, laminar flow to turbulent flow improves the ball's aerodynamics no end.
In sufficiently narrow channels, only a few tens of microns across, water flows without turbulence a state known as laminar flow.
Winging it How not to annoy your customers Girl power A question of demand The social technologist Reprints Related items Business jets in Asia: Hot ticketsSep 6th 2007The key to Aerion's abilities is its unusually shaped "natural laminar flow" wing, which reduces drag by up to 20% compared with previous delta-wing technology.
Mizuno, Japan's largest manufacturer of sports goods, has recently provided one a swimsuit that borrows from aircraft and maritime technology in an effort to reduce the drag that comes from having breasts.Designers of ships and aeroplanes try to maintain what is known as "laminar" flow along the surfaces of their craft.
The flow then ceases to be laminar and the amount of drag increases sharply.In this section Sonic boon The turbulent world of swimming In your face Birds of a feather mate together ReprintsThis is particularly prone to happen when the flow rises over a bump and then descends on the other side.
This could be done with surfaces that change shape, or by using a system of holes and slots that can be opened and closed as appropriate to create suction that maintains laminar flow.
See also laminar flow; turbulent flow.
In a fluid reacting to mechanical stress by undergoing laminar flow (i.e., nonturbulent viscous flow), the shearing motion of adjacent layers past one another is impeded by friction arising from the migration of individual molecules between the different layers.
