When visiting NASA Langley I had Josh Blake kindly take my picture by the Variable Density Wind Tunnel. Pioneered by Max Munk, leading theoretician in aerodynamics in America in our early years of aviation. National historical landmark: The test section and airflow passages built into the VDT pressure vessel formed a continuous flow of pressurized …
Author Archives: saemiller
On the Panel Method
After this I got more into aerodynamic research. The area rule involves calculating the flow about a bumpy body of revolution. Existing methods for calculating it were very poor. K. E. Van Every, my boss, talked to me about looking over the available methods and seeing what was best. I did and discovered an entirely …
Scale Model of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge
Salvador Dalí
If someday I may die, though it is unlikely, I hope the people in the cafés will say, ‘Dali has died, but not entirely.’ Salvador Dalí
BOLT2
Congratulations to the entire BOLT2/NASA/AFRL hypersonics boundary layer transition flight-test team on their successful launch yesterday.
Dryden, Prandt, von Kármán, and Tsien
Standard k-Epsilon Model
In the last few years a number of models of turbulent heat and momentum transport have been developed in which the effective transport coefficients are related to local values of certain turbulent correlations; these correlations are computed simultaneously with the mean field variables. Models of this kind achieve significantly greater breadth of applicability than do …
Hugoniot
Hugoniot with classmates from the École Polytechnique, 1870 . Hugoniot is second from left, front row, see insert.
Experiments in a Large-Boundary Layer Wind Tunnel: Propagation of Noise through the Turbulent Boundary Layer
My Group recently published a paper on a multiyear experiment campaign. We used the National Science Foundation Boundary Layer Wind Tunnel and sent acoustic waves through the boundary layer. We examined how turbulent structures altered the waveforms. The purpose is to create a high quality database available to the community to understand acoustic-turbulent interactions. Zhang, …
Paul Richard Heinrich Blasius
At Easter 1902 I had sat my final college examination, and was now studying mathematics. This was not simple for me: Although one can see what follows from certain algebraic manipulations, why would this be done? “By mathematics, you are convicted, instead of convinced”, according to the philosopher Schopenhauer. After some time, I realized that, …