Well,many of us will be thinking that
HOW AEROPLANES FLY??
Drop a stone into the ocean and it
will sink into the deep. Chuck a stone off the side of a mountain and it will
plummet as well. Sure, steel ships can float and even very heavy airplanes can
fly, but to achieve flight, you have to exploit the four basic aerodynamic forces: lift, weight, thrust and drag.
You can think of them as four arms holding the plane in the air, each pushing
from a different direction.
First, let's examine thrust and
drag. Thrust, whether caused by a propeller or a jet engine, is the aerodynamic
force that pushes or pulls the airplane forward through space. The opposing
aerodynamic force is drag, or the friction that resists the motion of an object
moving through a fluid (or immobile in a moving fluid, as occurs when you fly a
kite).If you stick your hand out of a car window while moving, you'll
experience a very simple demonstration of drag at work.For flight to take
place, thrust must be equal to or greater than the drag. If, for any reason,
the amount of drag becomes larger than the amount of thrust, the plane will
slow down. If the thrust is increased so that it's greater than the drag, the
plane will speed up.
Every object on Earth has weight, a
product of both gravity and mass. A Boeing 747-8 passenger airliner, for
instance, has a maximum takeoff weight of 487.5 tons (442 metric tons), the
force with which the weighty plane is drawn toward the Earth.Weight's opposing
force is lift, which holds an airplane in the air. This feat is accomplished
through the use of a wing, also known as an airfoil. Like drag, lift can exist
only in the presence of a moving fluid.What really matters is the relative
difference in speeds between the object and the fluid.
The wing is shaped and tilted so that the air moving over it travels faster than the air moving underneath. When moving air flows over an object and encounters an obstacle (such as a bump or a sudden increase in wing angle), its path narrows and the flow speeds up as all the molecules rush though.
The wing is shaped and tilted so that the air moving over it travels faster than the air moving underneath. When moving air flows over an object and encounters an obstacle (such as a bump or a sudden increase in wing angle), its path narrows and the flow speeds up as all the molecules rush though.
As air speeds up, its pressure
drops. So the faster-moving air moving over the wing exerts less pressure on it
than the slower air moving underneath the wing. The result is an upward push of
lift. In the field of fluid dynamics, this is known as Bernoulli's principle.
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