Tuesday, February 25, 2014

Brief remark on airship drag

I did a simple experiment yesterday with respect to drag.  As I was driving, I put my hand outside as I reached 60 mph.  A rough guess of the pressure, I'd say it was probably less than 10 pounds.  If it was just two pounds, then a square meter would be about 144 lbs, or about 65 kg.  It may be even less than this.

Also, I revisited the drag equation.  The mass number is the density of the medium through which the object passes.  Since it is air, and the air's density is about 1.2 kg/meter cubed, then the numbers used in the spreadsheet could be fairly close.  Just multiply by 1.2 and the percentage of sea level calculated per altitude could give a reasonably accurate result.  But I'm not sure yet.

Actually, the numbers from the spreadsheet when run out give a number that is still much less than 65 kg.  So, it could still be off.

One final thing after reading he Wikipedia article on drag.  At supersonic speeds and higher, there is another form of drag that could be more of a problem than this.

It's all an education.


No comments: