Hi again! Saksham here, a simulation and software engineer working at this company! I felt that we can make fluid flow interesting by taking an example from our everyday life and trying to realize how fluid flow affects its design which made me write the first column in this series. For part 2 let us look into how fluid dynamics affects airplane design in brief.

One of the most important parts of airplane design is the wings. The wings are shaped with smooth surfaces. There is a curve to the wings at cross section which helps push the air over the top more quickly than it goes under the wing. Which in turn creates a low pressure above the wing hence, in a way, sucking the wing upwards. 

Fig 1: Aerodynamics of a wing

These wings take various different kinds of shapes according to their use cases as well. For example, you must have seen fighter jets having enormous triangular wings while passenger planes have a quadrilateral shaped wing.

Fig 2.1: Simulating air flow across a wing   Fig 2.2: Different kinds of wing configurations.

If such a study makes you curious about the simulating these parts with CFD analysis this paper could be of use which shows us the software and methods used to simulate a simple cross-section wing. Stay tuned for part 3!