Research in Supersonic Flight and the Breaking of the Sound Barrier. Chapter 3. Research in Supersonic Flight andthe Breaking of the Sound Barrierby John D.
We could not agree whether it should be written with one s or. Dryden was logical and wanted two s's.
I thought it wasn't necessary. I wrote it with one s.
I introduced. the term in this form in a report to the Air Force. I am not sure whether. I will remember this. They thought the troubles indicated a. Beginning at 6: 0. Muroc Army Air Field readied a small rocket- powered. Painted orange, and resembling a 5.
Bell X- 1 research vehicle in the bomb bay of a four- engine B- 2. World War II vintage. At 1. 0: 0. 0 a. m., the B- 2.
As it passed. through 5,0. Captain Charles E. This morning Yeager was in pain from two broken ribs incurred. However, not wishing. Yeager informed no one at Muroc about.
Research in Supersonic Flight and the Breaking of the Sound Barrier. An American firm is planning to put supersonic commercial aircraft back in the skies five years after Concorde touched down for the last time. Aerospace firm Aerion won orders for a proposed supersonic business jet, hoping to entice customers to plunk down $120 million for a plane that could flit. Music video by Semisonic performing Closing Time.
Captain Jack Ridley, who helped. X- 1 cockpit. At 1.
Supersonic air travel gets set for a comeback: Nasa tests pave the way for the next generation of high-speed planes. Firms such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin have.
X- 1 dropped free from the bomb bay of the. B- 2. 9. Yeager fired his Reaction Motors XLR- 1. Entering this unknown regime, Yeager momentarily shut down. X- 1 as the Mach meter in the cockpit registered 0. At an altitude of 4. X- 1 finally started to level. Yeager fired one of the two shutdown rocket chambers.
The Mach. meter moved smoothly through 0. Here, the meter hesitated. A stronger bow shockwave now formed in the air ahead of the needlelike. X- 1 as Yeager reached a velocity of 7. Mach. 1. 0. 6, at 4. The flight was smooth; there was no violent buffeting.
At. this moment, Chuck Yeager became the first pilot to fly faster than the. Bell X- 1, became the first. This description of the first supersonic flight. John D. Anderson, Jr., Modern Compressible Flow: With. Historical Perspective (New York, NY. Mc. Graw- Hill Book Co., 1.
For a general reference, from Chuck Yeager's point of view. General Chuck Yeager and Leo Janos, Yeager.- An Autobiography.
New York, NY: Bantam Press, 1. For a definitive history of the circumstances. Bell X- 1, see Richard P.
Hallion, Supersonic Flight (New York, NY. But in the history of human intellectual accomplishment, this. The. purpose of this chapter is to tell this story.
The contribution by the. NACA to the Bell X- 1 was much more technical than it was administrative. Beginning in 1. 91. NACA embarked. on a systematic intellectual quest to obtain the knowledge required. Hansen, in his chapter on the NACA low- drag engine cowling, in. Was. it science, or was it engineering?
He comes to the conclusion that it was. In arriving at this conclusion, Hansen draws from the. Walter Vincenti's book, What Engineers Know and How They. Know It, where Vincenti clearly makes the following distinction between. In this chapter. we will see that NACA researchers in the 1. Also, within the general framework of the historical.
NACA's highspeed. For every count of five before you hear the thunder, the. Clearly, sound travels through air at. The standard sea. This is the basis. The. Mach number is the ratio of the speed of a gas to the speed of sound in. If the Mach number is 0.
Mach number of 2. RESEARCH IN SUPERSONIC FLIGHT AND THE BREAKING OF THE SOUND BARRIERthat of sound. The physics of a subsonic flow is totally different from. This is why the first supersonic flight of the X- 1 was so dramatic. Precisely 2. 60 years before the first supersonic flight of the. X- 1, Isaac Newton published the first calculation of the speed of sound. At that time it was clearly appreciated that sound propagated through.
Newton knew that artillery tests had already. In Proposition 5. Book II of. his Principia (1. Newton calculated a value of 9. Undaunted, Newton followed a now familiar ploy of theoreticians. However, in reality Newton. This misconception was corrected.
French mathematician, Pierre Simon. Marquis de Laplace, who properly assumed that a sound wave is adiabatic. Therefore. by the time of the demise of Napoleon, the process and equation for the.
The debate lasted well into the twentieth century. On October 1. 2, 1. U. S. They were attending a meeting of the Committee on Aerodynamics, one. NACA. Among the experts. Hugh L. Dryden from the Bureau of Standards, and John Stack. NACA Langley Memorial Laboratory.
Also present was Theodore von K. After subcommittee. John Stack, who stated that . Pierre Simon Marquis de Laplace, . Minutes of the Meeting of Committee on Aerodynamics.
October 1. 2, 1. 94. Found by the author in the John Stack files at.
NASA Langley Research Center Archives, Langley Research Center, Hampton. VA. Originally marked with security classification Confidential, the minutes. The Langley Archives are kept by Richard. T. Layman, who was exceptionally helpful to the author during the course. Measured values gave weighted means of 1,1. Dryden noted that the specific heats were. Stack to work out.
However, for engineering purposes this. Dryden's suggestion of a round value of 1,1.
Here. is a little- known example of how the NACA played a role in the fundamentals. This is. because the airflow increases its velocity while moving over the top of. This supersonic pocket was terminated. This shock formation was the culprit which made. Mach one such a harrowing concern at that time. Finally. when the X- 1 accelerated through Mach one to supersonic speeds, another.
As shown above). Shock waves are a fact of life in the. The German mathematician. G. Bernhard Riemann first attempted to calculate shock properties in. Twelve years later. William John Rankine, a noted engineering professor at the University of. Glasgow, correctly derived the.
A shock wave is, in thermodynamic language. A measure of the amount of irreversibility is a. Second Law of Thermodynamics.
The entropy. of a gas always increases as it passes through a shock wave. Unfortunately. Riemann made the incorrect assumption that the entropy remained constant. Not cognizant. of Rankine's work, the French ballistician Pierre Hugoniot rediscovered. To the present day, the governing. Rankine- Hugoniot.
This work was expanded to include oblique shock waves by the famous German. Ludwig Prandtl and his student Theodor Meyer at G. Perhaps the most important event was the proof that shock waves were. This. proof was given by the physicistphysician- philosopher Ernst Mach in 1. But Mach devised a. In 1. 88. 7, he presented a paper to the Academy. Sciences in Vienna where he showed a photograph of a bullet moving at.
Using his shadowgraph system, the bow shock and trailing. This historic photograph. The experimental study of shock waves was off and running.
Anderson, Jr., Modern Compressible. Flow: With Historical Perspective, (New York, NY. Mc. Graw Hill, 1.
The true practical value of this work did not. However. this is an excellent example of the value of basic research on problems. In the 1. 94. 0s, when basic.
The researchers. involved in this work were after scientific knowledge, and just that. There. was no force behind these researchers driving them to design any related. Compressibility Problems: The First Inklings(1. Airplane aerodynamics, from the time of the Wright Flyer to the beginning.
World War II, assumed that changes in air density were negligible as. This assumption, called incompressible. Theoretically, it was a tremendous advantage to assume. All this. changed when flight speeds began to sneak up close to the speed of sound. It had to do with an. Although typical flight speeds of.
World War I airplanes were less than 1. This drove. the British Advisory Committee for Aeronautics to show some interest in. Bryan, working for the. Committee at the Royal Aeronautical Establishment, carried out a theoretical. He was able to show that in a. His analysis was cumbersome and complex .
But it was evidence. British over the effects of compressibility. At the same time, Frank Caldwell and Elisha Fales of the propeller branch. Army Air Service Engineering Division at Mc. Cook Field in Dayton.
Ohio, took a purely experimental. Report for the Year 1. Advisory. Committee for Aeronautics, England, p. Technical Report of the Advisory. Committee for Aeronautics, Vol.
Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, April 1. Over. the next two decades, the major experimental contributions to understanding. United States, principally. NACA, and the major theoretical contributions were to be made in. England.) In 1. 91. Caldwell and Fales designed and built the first high- speed.
United States . The tunnel velocity range was from 2. It had a length of almost nineteen feet, and the test section.
This was a big and powerful machine for. Six different airfoils, with thickness ratios (ratio of maximum. At the higher. speeds, the results showed . Here, the lift coefficient for the airfoil at. The critical Mach number is precisely defined.
Mach number at which sonic flow is first encountered. The large drag rise due to compressibility effects. Mach number slightly above the critical. Mach number; this is called the drag- divergence Mach number. In reality. Caldwell and Fales had reached and exceeded the drag- divergence Mach number.
But their introduction of the word . Note the dramatic. This plot, and ones like it for other angles. NACA TR 8. 3, are the first published data. This was. an important finding, and one which would have a lasting impact on high- speed.
It is noteworthy that the fledgling NACA was the government agency which. Caldwell and Fales. The NACA was carrying out its duty as stated in Public Law 2. Committee in 1. 91. Wood. two aerodynamicists at the Royal Aeronautical Establishment, tested model. National Physical Laboratory in London. They also carried out flight tests on a De.
Haviland D. H. Their. This author, upon Studying Caldwell and. Fales detailed data reduction, has found that, although they recognized. They thought. they had worked their data reduction so that . This is why they said that . This resulted in about a ten percent. For more details, see John D.
Anderson, Jr., The History of. Aerodynamics, and its Impact on Flying Machines (New York, NY: Cambridge. University Press, 1. Air Experimental Investigation of.
Performance of an Airscrew Over a Range of Speeds of Revolution from.