I don’t understand all the internet explanations using terms like “Range of attack” “Stall speed”
I’m trying to understand why it matters that the wing has a blunt front, if just angling a flat sheet slightly upwards should in my theory still lift it up at speed.
Although those round edges intuitively make sense somehow, i just want to understand why they work.
In: 0
Air doesn’t go fast around sharp corners very well. When you force air around a sharp corner, right behind the corner is a sort of swirly area where the airflow kinda loops back around on itself instead of just continuing on its way, while the main air flow goes around the outside of the swirly part. This is called ‘flow separation’ and it screws up the aerodynamics of a wing. The swirly part doesn’t have the same low pressure you would find if the air was flowing along the surface of the wing, and there’s lots of extra drag because it still takes energy to make the swirly part swirl, but that energy isn’t doing anything useful for your airplane.
So if your flat plate, sharp wing is curved a little, you could line the front of it up with the direction the air is going and it would work ok; there would be no sharp turn in the air flow and the air would follow the curve around and be going down a little bit at the end. But it would pretty much only work well at that specific angle. If you changed the angle very much, you’d suddenly have a sharp corner in the flow. For airplane wings, it’s important that you can change the angle, because generally flying slow requires a higher angle than flying fast, and it’s good to fly slow when you land.
Latest Answers