AERODYNAMICS · AN EXPERIMENT IN CONTROL
Flow State.
Read the air. Find the balance.
Your objective: maintain useful lift while controlling flow separation and the energy cost of drag. Every adjustment changes the system.
EXPERIMENT 01
Read the wind
Angle above the horizon. ↑ / ↓ adjust when a slider is not focused.
More camber and area; more profile drag.
Design experiment: span is adjustable in this lab, not in flight.
Set the wing attitude, then start the experiment.
EXPERIMENT COMPLETE
WHAT THE AIR IS TELLING YOU
One wing. Two accounts of lift.
A pressure difference acts on the wing while the wing gives the surrounding air downward momentum. These are compatible descriptions of the same interaction. Follow the streamlines and the force vectors together.
Increase incidence gently and watch the lift response.
Before your first run: the vocabulary
- Angle of attack (α)
- Angle between the wing chord and incoming relative airflow. Attitude alone does not determine it.
- Boundary layer
- The thin region slowed by viscosity at the surface. An adverse pressure gradient can cause separation.
- Stall
- Loss of attached flow beyond a critical angle, with reduced lift and increased pressure drag.
- Induced drag
- The drag associated with producing lift with a finite wing.
- Kutta condition
- Attached flow leaves a sharp trailing edge smoothly. This lab depicts established flow, not the starting-vortex transient.
Model, scoring & limitations
Fixed-horizon wind-tunnel model with a 3,060 kg reference mass, density 1.225 kg/m³, and 22 m² reference wing. Speed evolves from thrust minus drag. Lift does not change altitude; this isolates the wing experiment.
L = ½ρV²SCₗ. D = ½ρV²S(Cᴅ₀ + Cₗ²/πeAR + Cᴅ,separation). AR = b²/S; e = 0.8. Lift slope is 0.105 per degree until an illustrative 15° clean critical angle. Flaps alter area, camber, drag and the critical angle. Separation and reattachment have response delays.
Score = percentage of the full run with lift / weight from 0.90 to 1.10 and attached flow. Experiment 03 multiplies that by 0.7 + 0.3 × max(0, 1 − energy / 25 MJ). Pausing earns no time or points. Scores are local run results, separate from the arcade’s verified rankings.
Streamlines, pressure colors and vectors are qualitative schematics, not CFD. Stall angles and flap effects are illustrative, not aircraft performance data. No compressibility, pitching dynamics, ground effect, altitude dynamics or operational procedures are modeled.
The lesson behind the lab
Inspired by Prof. P. M. Sarun’s Applications of Fluids and Its Motion — Aeroplanes, IIT (ISM) Dhanbad: attached-flow and stalled-flow illustrations (c4, c6), relative-wind diagram (c5), and the discussion of high-lift devices and induced drag.
The diagrams here are newly drawn. We do not assume equal transit times over and under a wing. A cambered wing can produce lift at zero geometric angle. Stall is governed by angle of attack, not a universal minimum speed. Numerical speeds and wake-separation intervals in the lesson are not used as operational rules.