- #36
- 3,469
- 1,263
Buckleymanor said:If the shape of the wing by any design causes the air velocity over and under the wing to be dramatically different then you get lift.
It does not have to be the case that the shape of the wing causes the travel time to be different but when it does you still get lift.
You could apply flaps and creat drag in one direction to creat lift.
The distance can be the same or different but as you say it's the difference between air velocity over and under or vice versa that causes a pressure differential which causes lift?
That is reasonably accurate. There are a couple of clarifications or fixes to make to your statement though:
For one, in general, the transit time is not the same for a lift-generating body. You would need a very special case for that to occur, and I am not even really sure that you could design a lifting body to do that. Generally speaking, the air traveling over the wing is much faster than that traveling under it (several times faster), so the top surface would have to be designed to be substantially longer, at which point it would likely stop being a lifting body. So, yes, it does not have to be the case that the shape causes the travel times to be different, but to take that one step further, I cannot imagine a situation where the travel times would be the same.
Second, be careful with correlation and causation. Lowering the flaps to create drag will certainly happen, but it is not the creation of that drag that causes the generation of lift. Lift and drag are two sides of the same coin here. Essentially, in lowering flaps, you are increasing the camber of the airfoil. This allows the airfoil to generate more lift at lower speeds and lower angles of attack (of the plane, anyway), and of course along with lift comes drag. You can't have one without the other. To explain why that is, it is perhaps easiest to think in terms of the net momentum change of the flow around the wing.
Any time you have lift, your airfoil will be necessarily deflecting air downward. If you were to draw a large box around the airfoil and do a control volume analysis, you would be able to integrate the total momentum coming into the control volume, which will be entirely in the horizontal direction, and then integrate the total momentum leaving the control volume, which, due to the deflection, would be partially horizontal and partially vertical. That addition of vertical momentum to the fluid is done by a force coming from the wing whose opposite according to Newton is lift. The flow will also have lost some momentum in the horizontal direction, which occurs due to a force coming from the body whose opposite and equal counterpart is drag. Put simply, with lift and drag, one doesn't causes the other. They both must occur at the same time.
Of course, you could explain this same thing by looking at the pressures over the airfoil and you would get the same answer for an inviscid flow. I simply find it easier to illustrate why and how drag and lift are related using Newton's laws and flow deflection.