Natural Shapes in the Wind Tunnel

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Ok engineers, listen up! You know, we’ve been trying to improve the performance of our aircraft, and so we’re bringing in a design team that’s got lots of experience. Millions of years of experience, actually. I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet and that scenario isn’t as far-fetched as you might think. Barry Lazos is an aeronautics research engineer at Langley Research Center. He was part of a project which studied the denizens of the sea and skies to come up with new ways of designing aircraft

“Flying creatures and swimming creatures have been around for millions of years. In fact, there are over a million-plus species of flying insects. There are around ten thousand species of bats and birds, and there are 23,000 species of marine creatures. In fact most living things propel themselves through a fluid, that fluid being either air or water. And since they’ve been around so long they’ve developed certain techniques through evolution so that they can survive and reproduce. And some of them are pretty advanced. So even though we have advanced aeronautics to a significant degree, we were hoping that we could come upon something that we hadn’t thought of before that was apparent in nature. The benefits that I was looking for were predominantly drag reduction. Whenever you have something moving through the air, there’s drag created by just friction on the surface. Or there’s drag created by the way the fluid, or air, flows around the object. So we wanted to see if we could come up with some shapes that would reduce this drag.”

In future programs, we’ll here more about the roles that natural shapes might play in aeronautical design innovations. Pulse of the Planet is made possible by the National Science Foundation with additional support from NASA. I’m Jim Metzner.

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Natural Shapes in the Wind Tunnel

Looking for inspiration, aeronautics researchers test shapes that have been in use for millions of years.
Air Date:08/03/2010
Scientist:
Transcript:

music

Ok engineers, listen up! You know, we've been trying to improve the performance of our aircraft, and so we're bringing in a design team that's got lots of experience. Millions of years of experience, actually. I'm Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet and that scenario isn't as far-fetched as you might think. Barry Lazos is an aeronautics research engineer at Langley Research Center. He was part of a project which studied the denizens of the sea and skies to come up with new ways of designing aircraft

"Flying creatures and swimming creatures have been around for millions of years. In fact, there are over a million-plus species of flying insects. There are around ten thousand species of bats and birds, and there are 23,000 species of marine creatures. In fact most living things propel themselves through a fluid, that fluid being either air or water. And since they've been around so long they've developed certain techniques through evolution so that they can survive and reproduce. And some of them are pretty advanced. So even though we have advanced aeronautics to a significant degree, we were hoping that we could come upon something that we hadn't thought of before that was apparent in nature. The benefits that I was looking for were predominantly drag reduction. Whenever you have something moving through the air, there's drag created by just friction on the surface. Or there's drag created by the way the fluid, or air, flows around the object. So we wanted to see if we could come up with some shapes that would reduce this drag."

In future programs, we'll here more about the roles that natural shapes might play in aeronautical design innovations. Pulse of the Planet is made possible by the National Science Foundation with additional support from NASA. I'm Jim Metzner.

music