So how do airplanes fly? With a little magic…
Not really!
Airfoils are designed to force air flow underneath and over the top. Airfoils are designed in a way that cause a lifting action that is greater than the weight of an aircraft. Types of airfoils found on aircraft are the wings an the propeller.
An airfoil profile is a cross section of a wing. By looking at the cross section of an airfoil, it shows different curvatures called cambers.
Small aircraft have 4 types of airfoils:
Wings
Vertical Stabilizer
Horizontal Stabilizer
Propeller blades
The upper camber is more curved than the lower camber. There are two other features, the rounded end called the leading edge, which is the part that faces forward. The back end of the airfoil tapers down to an edge is called the trailing edge.
The chord line is an imaginer reference line drawn from the trailing edge to the leading edge that denoted the upper and lower cambers.
Pressures:
Bernoulli’s Principle - Remember Bernoulli’s Principle of Pressure, the airflow over the top of the airfoil increases in speed which drops the pressure, this is the component of lift. But does not account for the total lift.
Newton’s third law - We need to apply Newton’s third law, when the air flows backward over the upper surface of the airfoil it travels downward, which produces an upward forward force on the airfoil.
The air flowing underneath the airfoil also produces a certain amount of lift, which results in a high pressure. When the pressure differences between the upper and lower surfaces of an airfoil increase total lift increases.
Remember:
There are 4 types of Airfoils: wings, vertical stabilizer (tail), horizontal stabilizer, and the blades of the propeller.
The parts of an Airfoil:
Upper & Lower camber
Chord line
Mean camber line
Leading edge & tailing edge
References:
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