Early British Work on Lift and Drag
Early British Work on Lift and Drag
Rayleigh Flow versus the Aerodynamics of Intuition
This chapter discusses discontinuity and how it became the main focus of the ACA in its theoretical and experimental research efforts concerning lift. The immediate research aim of the ACA was to provide a mathematical analysis that would predict the forces exerted on a flat or curved plate immersed at an angle to a flowing fluid. The plate was to function as a simple model of an aircraft wing, and the mathematically idealized fluid, necessary to perform the calculations, was to act as a model of the air. To calculate the forces, researchers needed a precise and quantitative picture of the flow around the wing. For the British, the best available guess was provided by Rayleigh's important work on discontinuous flow, which appeared to the ACA as the rational place to start. This chapter describes this work and, in later sections, contrasts it with the ideas about lift put forward by the leading representative of the “practical men.” .
Keywords: discontinuity, ACA, lift, mathematical analysis, aircraft wing, fluid, Rayleigh, discontinuous flow, practical men
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