Before the Concorde even began regular flights, protests over its sound levels caused the U.S. and many other countries to ban overland commercial supersonic flight. Those restrictions have stood for Keep reading
Tag: computational fluid dynamics
Beneath the Surface
Signs of a ship’s passage can persist long after it’s gone. The churn of its propellers and the oil leaked from its engines leave a mark on the water’s surface Keep reading
Droplet Medusa
Vibration is one method for breaking a drop into smaller droplets, a process known as atomization. Here, researchers simulate this break-up process for a drop in microgravity. Waves crisscrossing the Keep reading
Fish Fins Work Together
Researchers studying how fish swim have long focused on their tail fins and the flows created there. But a fish’s other fins have important effects, too, as seen in this Keep reading
Predicting Contamination in Urban Environs
The canyons of a city’s streets form a complex flow environment. To better understand the risks of a spreading contaminant, researchers simulated a release in lower Manhattan’s urban jungle. The Keep reading
A Bubble’s Path
Centuries ago, Leonardo da Vinci noticed something peculiar about bubbles rising through water. Small bubbles followed a straight path, but slightly larger ones swung back and forth or corkscrewed upward. Keep reading
Swimming Intermittently
Many fish do not swim continuously; instead, they use an intermittent motion, swimming in a sudden burst and then coasting. This intermittent swimming is tough to simulate, due to its Keep reading
Exascale Simulations
Capturing what goes on inside a combustion engine is incredibly difficult. It’s a problem that depends on turbulent flow, chemistry, heat transfer, and more. To represent all of those aspects Keep reading
Why Moths Are Slow Fliers
Hawkmoths and other insects are slow fliers compared to birds, even ones that can hover. To understand why these insects top out at 5 m/s, researchers simulated their flight from Keep reading
Escaping the Sun
One enduring mystery of the solar wind — a stream of high-energy particles expelled from the sun — is how the particles get accelerated in the first place. The sun Keep reading