Designer's Notebook

The design must focus on sufficiently cooling the engine while minimizing drag.

Cooling the engine and its accessories requires a continuous flow of air to come in from outside the airplane to absorb heat from the...

As we saw last month, an ideal cooling air inlet system should ingest air from the free stream and bring it to rest or...

The cooling air inlet serves two functions: First, and most important, the inlet must ingest enough air to properly cool the engine and accessories...

As we saw in last month’s edition of Wind Tunnel, only about one-third of the energy released by burning the fuel in an internal...

The cooling system is a major component of the airplane. It has a large impact on the performance and reliability of the machine. The...

We often treat the propeller as a uniform “actuator disc” and the slipstream as a uniform stream tube of accelerated and swirling air. While...

We’ve touched on this during previous discussions of slipstream (most recently in the April 2023 issue), but there are several power and propeller effects...

The propeller of an airplane generates thrust that drives it through the air. In addition to propelling the airplane, the thrust of the propeller...

The propeller slipstream affects the aerodynamics of the airplane. A propeller accelerates air backward and also imparts a swirl. The air in the slipstream...