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The layer of air over the wing's surface that is slowed down or stopped by viscosity, is the boundary layer. There are two different types of boundary layer flow: laminar and turbulent. [1] Laminar boundary layer flow. The laminar boundary is a very smooth flow, while the turbulent boundary layer contains swirls or "eddies."
In boundary layer flow over a flat plate, experiments confirm that, after a certain length of flow, a laminar boundary layer will become unstable and turbulent. This instability occurs across different scales and with different fluids, usually when Re x ≈ 5 × 10 5 , [ 12 ] where x is the distance from the leading edge of the flat plate, and ...
The boundary layer thickness, , is the distance normal to the wall to a point where the flow velocity has essentially reached the 'asymptotic' velocity, .Prior to the development of the Moment Method, the lack of an obvious method of defining the boundary layer thickness led much of the flow community in the later half of the 1900s to adopt the location , denoted as and given by
A reasonable assessment of whether the boundary layer will be laminar or turbulent can be made by calculating the Reynolds number of the local flow conditions. Separation occurs in flow that is slowing down, with pressure increasing, after passing the thickest part of a streamline body or passing through a widening passage, for example.
In fluid dynamics, the process of a laminar flow becoming turbulent is known as laminar–turbulent transition. The main parameter characterizing transition is the Reynolds number. Transition is often described as a process proceeding through a series of stages. Transitional flow can refer to transition in either direction, that is laminar ...
A schematic diagram of the Blasius flow profile. The streamwise velocity component () / is shown, as a function of the similarity variable .. Using scaling arguments, Ludwig Prandtl [1] argued that about half of the terms in the Navier-Stokes equations are negligible in boundary layer flows (except in a small region near the leading edge of the plate).
= / is the Reynolds number. This turbulent boundary layer thickness formula assumes 1) the flow is turbulent right from the start of the boundary layer and 2) the turbulent boundary layer behaves in a geometrically similar manner (i.e. the velocity profiles are geometrically similar along the flow in the x-direction, differing only by ...
The above equation, which is derived from Prandtl's one-seventh-power law, [6] provided a reasonable approximation of the drag coefficient of low-Reynolds-number turbulent boundary layers. [7] Compared to laminar flows, the skin friction coefficient of turbulent flows lowers more slowly as the Reynolds number increases.