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Subsonic. Mach 1. Supersonic. Shock wave. The sound barrier or sonic barrier is the large increase in aerodynamic drag and other undesirable effects experienced by an aircraft or other object when it approaches the speed of sound. When aircraft first approached the speed of sound, these effects were seen as constituting a barrier, making faster ...
Mach number. Ratio of speed of an object moving through fluid and local speed of sound. The Mach number (M or Ma), often only Mach, (/ mɑːk /; German: [max]) is a dimensionless quantity in fluid dynamics representing the ratio of flow velocity past a boundary to the local speed of sound. [1][2] It is named after the Austrian physicist and ...
Supersonic speed is the speed of an object that exceeds the speed of sound (Mach 1). For objects traveling in dry air of a temperature of 20 °C (68 °F) at sea level, this speed is approximately 343.2 m/s (1,126 ft/s; 768 mph; 667.1 kn; 1,236 km/h). Speeds greater than five times the speed of sound (Mach 5) are often referred to as hypersonic.
When v > c, the Mach cone is visible. The sound of a sonic boom depends largely on the distance between the observer and the aircraft shape producing the sonic boom. A sonic boom is usually heard as a deep double "boom" as the aircraft is usually some distance away. The sound is much like that of mortar bombs, commonly used in firework displays ...
The sound source has now broken through the sound speed barrier, and is traveling at 1.4 times the speed of sound, c (Mach 1.4). Because the source is moving faster than the sound waves it creates, it actually leads the advancing wavefront. The sound source will pass by a stationary observer before the observer actually hears the sound it creates.
Drag-divergence Mach number. The drag-divergence Mach number (not to be confused with critical Mach number) is the Mach number at which the aerodynamic drag on an airfoil or airframe begins to increase rapidly as the Mach number continues to increase. [1] This increase can cause the drag coefficient to rise to more than ten times its low-speed ...
Transonic (or transsonic) flow is air flowing around an object at a speed that generates regions of both subsonic and supersonic airflow around that object. [1] The exact range of speeds depends on the object's critical Mach number, but transonic flow is seen at flight speeds close to the speed of sound (343 m/s at sea level), typically between Mach 0.8 and 1.2.
In aerodynamics, the critical Mach number (Mcr or M*) of an aircraft is the lowest Mach number at which the airflow over some point of the aircraft reaches the speed of sound, but does not exceed it. [1] At the lower critical Mach number, airflow around the entire aircraft is subsonic. Supersonic aircraft such as the Concorde and combat ...