THE performance-sapping turbulence of air passing over aircraft wings can be suppressed by carefully designed roughness in the surfaces.
So says a team at KTH, the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, in defiance of the conventional wisdom that roughness inevitably promotes turbulence. The team’s experiments could have far-reaching consequences for the aerospace industry, which spends vast amounts to reduce this costly effect.
“Turbulence is associated with increased friction drag, the resistance of a thin body when it slides past slower moving air,” says Luca Brandt, a member of the KTH team. “Delaying turbulence is important to decrease the drag.” Reducing drag would increase fuel efficiency,…
