Easy tips

What causes friction and drag?

What causes friction and drag?

Friction Drag, also known as Skin Friction Drag, is drag caused by the friction of a fluid against the surface of an object that is moving through it. It is directly proportional to the area of the surface in contact with the fluid and increases with the square of the velocity.

How do you overcome drag?

Some things can be done to reduce pressure drag:

  1. Using an aero helmet to reduce the low-pressure zone directly behind the head.
  2. Keeping the body as low as possible so air stays attached as it flows over the back.

What causes drag between an object and fluid?

Drag is generated by the difference in velocity between the solid object and the fluid. There must be motion between the object and the fluid. If there is no motion, there is no drag. It makes no difference whether the object moves through a static fluid or whether the fluid moves past a static solid object.

How does drag affect the speed of an aircraft?

Drag is associated with the movement of the aircraft through the air, so drag depends on the velocity of the air. Like lift, drag actually varies with the square of the relative velocity between the object and the air. The inclination of the object to the flow also affects the amount of drag generated by a given shaped object.

Where does the drag come from in an airplane?

Drag is the aerodynamic force that opposes an aircraft’s motion through the air. Drag is generated by every part of the airplane (even the engines! ).

How does geometry affect the amount of drag?

As with aircraft lift, there are many factors that affect drag. Geometry has a large effect on the amount of drag generated by an object. As with lift, the drag depends linearly on the size of the object moving through the air.

What are the effects of drag?

Drag can affect the quickest falling speed (the terminal velocity) of an object. The higher the drag, the slower the object falls.

What kind of friction causes drag?

We can think of drag as aerodynamic friction, and one of the sources of drag is the skin friction between the molecules of the air and the solid surface of the aircraft. Because the skin friction is an interaction between a solid and a gas, the magnitude of the skin friction depends on properties of both solid and gas.

How does drag effect vehicles?

Drag force on a vehicle acts on the same plane as the direction of motion (horizontally) and increases exponentially as speed increases. This makes a car’s aerodynamic properties particularly important for hypercar developers like Bugatti .

How do you calculate drag?

We know that the drag force on an object is defined as: F D = ρ*v 2*C D*A/2. , where ρ is the density of the fluid the object is travelling in, v is the velocity of the object, C D is the drag coefficient of the object and A is the surface area of the object. Rearranging the formula to find drag coefficient, we have: C D = (2*F D)/(ρ*v 2*A)

Author Image
Ruth Doyle