Word: laminar
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Perfect Maze. The solution, surprisingly, has long been obvious. But while engineers knew that the laminar (smooth) airflow they wanted could be had by sucking any turbulent air into a wing's inner cavity, putting theory into practice proved a stubborn puzzle. Dr. Pfenninger worked on his LFC (laminar flow control) wing for 23 years before perfecting its closely packed slits that are only a few thousandths of an inch wide. Under each slit, a small chamber gathers the incoming air and channels it through pin-size holes into ducts that lead to streamlined nacelles hanging under each wing...
...Harvey," soon had the nickname tagged back on him. No great shakes as an office manager, he watched his desk disappear under piles of paper, often had to whistle in the janitors to dredge his work out of the wastepaper. But somehow Allen got his job done, e.g., the laminar-flow air foil of the P-51 fighter of World War II, a supersonic freeflight wind tunnel in which a model plane is fired into a blast...
...plane and drank up the engine's power. In theory, the scientists knew that this "burble" effect could be prevented by sucking into the wing a thin layer of air, and with it the incipient eddies. The remaining air would glide past the whole wing in smooth "laminar flow" (see diagram...
...Power. From the beginning the British had especially admired the Mustang's lovely lines and the aerodynamic efficiency of its sharp-edged "laminar flow" wing. More than a year ago they tried stepping the plane up with a more powerful engine, and passed the tip on to the U.S. Air Forces, which took up the same experiment. The present P-51B is ail-American except for the design of its 1,500-h.p. Packard-built Rolls-Royce Merlin engine (same type used in the latest Spitfires). It chews the air with a four-bladed propeller, has a two-speed...
NACA's engineers have succeeded in designing a wing which has laminar flow over virtually its entire surface. The result: reduction of the wing drag by about...