Questions tagged [aerospace-engineering]
Aerospace engineering is the primary branch of engineering concerned with the research, design, development, construction, and testing of aircraft and spacecraft.
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How to make smoke for a small wind tunnel?
I am making a small (desktop) wind tunnel for educational purposes, I want to have 10 fairly thick smoke-streams about 3cm apart. I have experimented with incense but the stream is not thick enough ...
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Is interference between aircraft an issue for fly-by-wireless technology?
I was reading up on fly-by-wire development, and I saw a short section about fly-by-wireless technology. It seems like a great idea, with the potential to lower costs, weight and complexity. I can see ...
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What is the difference between aeronautical and aerospace engineering?
Every time I search for "aeronautical engineering" on Google I see a few results about aerospace engineering. So they must be similar, but what is different about these careers?
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Would a "lifting body" design be useful for a train car?
Lifting Body
The idea of a lifting body design is to shape a vehicle's body in such a way as to produce lift without wings. Research has shown that this can be an efficient method of reducing drag ...
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How is lift related to airspeed?
Lift produced by an airplane wing is related to airspeed - this much is clear; a plane moving too slowly will stall. But what is that relation? Linear? Quadratic? Exponential? I don't need the exact ...
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Could air-launched space planes reach escape velocities?
Rockets like the Ariane 5 weigh hundreds of tons, but with about 85% of that weight being fuel, the payload fraction is only about 3% (~10-20 tons).
Virgin Galactic is building suborbital space ...
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How are wind tunnel models used when designing supersonic aircraft?
There are two things involved: wave drag and boundary layer separation. The wave drag depends on the Mach number while the latter depends on the Reynolds number of the flow. It's easy to maintain the ...
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MIMO (multi input - multi output) system decoupling method
A MIMO system with 2 input and 2 output decoupling method to a SISO system is described in many articles and books. How about m*n size transfer functions systems? How can we generalize the method for ...
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Can we add treadmill-like structures over the airplane surfaces to reduce friction, decrease drag and producing energy?
I am curious about a method to enhance the efficiency of passenger aircraft during cruise speeds by integrating treadmill-like structures on the fuselage and beneath the wings without changing the ...
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Efficiency in a gas turbine or aircraft engine
Most modern aircraft engines, such as the one depicted below taken from Wikipedia, are composed of several compressor stages which are driven by a turbine (or several), and a combustion chamber in-...
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What are the advantages of chemical oxygen generation over compressed tank storage?
Chemical oxygen generation (COG) is used in commercial airliners to supply emergency oxygen to passengers and crew if the plane is depressurized. Weight for weight it produces far more oxygen than ...
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Why use non-dimensional coefficients?
Aerospace engineering textbooks make frequent use of non-dimensional coefficients like $C_L$, $C_D$ and a whole host of others. Usually, for equations of motion, it is preferred to replace variables ...
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Convergent-Divergent Nozzle Design from Exhaust Velocity
I'm working on designing a Cold Spray system that uses a convergent-divergent nozzle to achieve a 800 m/s exhaust velocity. I'm assuming 400 psi nitrogen at room temperature is provided at the inlet ...
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Can vacuum balloon become possible with this idea?
As it is well known, a vacuum balloon using the materials we have at our disposal is not possible, because of the sheer force they have to resist from the air outside.
I asked this question on ...
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Does every engineering design needs to have a complete theoretical backing or may experimental data suffice?
This may sound rather vague on its own so I will explain with examples.
The solid booster rockets used by NASA space shuttle used a central bore design because it had a certain characteristic on ...
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