Recent content by boneh3ad

The bible for wind tunnel design: https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Low-Speed+Wind+Tunnel+Testing,+3rd+Edition-p-9780471557746 An extremely thick tome on experimental techniques (though close to 20 years out of date now): https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-540-30299-5 Any introductory...

The weights and balances/mass properties part of this that @DaveC426913 suggested are really the best answer. The actual most efficient shape purely from an aerodynamics standpoint is the same in air or water. But the system-level trades are not the same because the system requirements are all...

Mie scattering applies to spherical particles with a size on the order of the wavelength of the incident light or larger. If they get sufficiently large, it turns into just a typical reflection rather than a true scattering event. I would think 50 microns still falls within the Mie scattering model.

I suspect the concept you are seeking is Mie scattering.

I spend my days on mostly fluid physics, not actual flight. And my original background was mechanical engineering, not aerospace. I have some nefarious plans to expand into actually flying things in the future, so I'm just exploring what options are out there as references to help get me up to...

Well sure. I just didn't know if anyone more familiar with the field had any suggestions about which options are better than others.

I am looking for recommendations for reference/textbooks on flight dynamics.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "experimentally minded books." Any good experiment still needs a good theoretical background to make sense of the data. The only real book about fluid mechanics experiments, broadly, is probably the Springer Handbook of Experimental Fluid Mechanics. It's a...

Davidson has a book that has some alternative approaches to those of Pope that may be worth a look. You can also take a look at some of the older works like Batchelor or Hinze or the two-volume beast that is Monin and Yaglom (though their goal is the statistical treatment of the problem)...

You are correct, it does not apply to adiabatic, irreversible processes. But that's kind built right into the word itself: isentropic. That implies the process must be constant-entropy, i.e., reversible. I don't immediately know why the site you link is using it without specifying the...

Just remove the question from "defense contractors" and think about it for any job in engineering. The engineering challenges at, say, Ford, are still going to be more complex than what a student typically sees in school. I don't know of any mechanical engineering programs that have required...

I just can't help but wonder how this passed peer review in an actual journal. It's a fun exercise, but contributes nothing to the field.

I mean, the definition of a blast wave requires it to be supersonic. It will eventually weaken into an acoustic wave. So that was pretty silly by said poster.

"...truth ... is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations..." - John von Neumann, 1947

This is also just a scaled technology demonstrator. Boom intends to build a 64-80 passenger airliner that may or may not incorporate sonic boom mitigation technology used by the X-59 (assuming Boom doesn't fold at some point and the X-59 is successful, of course).