Almost everyone has their own definition of the term hypersonic. If we were to conduct something like a public opinion poll among those present, and asked everyone to name a Mach number above which the flow of a gas should properly be described as hypersonic there would be a majority of answers round about 5 …
Category Archives: History
Wright’s Split Flap Patent
Sheet I of the U.S. Patent 1,504.663, by Orville Wright and J. M. H. Jacobs, illustrating their concept of a split flap.
Sonic Boom for Lilliputians
On Large-Scale HPC from Viewpoint of Cebeci
One other aspect should be mentioned. When the program was transferred to El Segundo from Santa Monica, I naturally duplicated some runs. The printout was eight-decimal places, I believe. For a number of steps the new and old tab sheets would check exactly. But then after a while there would be a gradual drift; first …
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Variable Density Wind Tunnel
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 …
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
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.