Effects of nacelle shape on drag and weight of a supersonic cruising aircraft

The quantitive relationship of cruise drag and nacelle shape was investigated for a representative advanced supersonic transport configuration. Nacelle shape parameters were systematically varied, and the effects of these variations on wave and friction drag were determined. The effects of changes in vehicle drag, propulsion weight, and specific fuel consumption on vehicle takeoff gross weight were computed. Generally, it was found that nacelle shapes such that the maximum cross-sectional area occurred at or near the nozzle exit resulted in the lowest wave drag. In fact, nacelle shapes were found that produce favorable interference effects (drag reduction) of such magnitude as to nearly offset the friction drag of the nacelle

The Size Distribution of Trans-Neptunian Bodies

[Condensed] We search 0.02 deg^2 for trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) with m<=29.2 (diameter ~15 km) using the ACS on HST. Three new objects are discovered, roughly 25 times fewer than expected from extrapolation of the differential sky density Sigma(m) of brighter objects. The ACS and other recent TNO surveys show departures from a power law size distribution. Division of the TNO sample into ``classical Kuiper belt'' (CKB) and ``Excited'' samples reveals that Sigma(m) differs for the two populations at 96% confidence. A double power law adequately fits all data. Implications include: The total mass of the CKB is ~0.010 M_Earth, only a few times Pluto's mass, and is predominately in the form of ~100 km bodies. The mass of Excited objects is perhaps a few times larger. The Excited class has a shallower bright-end size distribution; the largest objects, including Pluto, comprise tens of percent of the total mass whereas the largest CKBOs are only ~2% of its mass. The predicted mass of the largest Excited body is close to the Pluto mass; the largest CKBO is ~60 times less massive. The deficit of small TNOs occurs for sizes subject to disruption by present-day collisions, suggesting extensive depletion by collisions. Both accretion and erosion appearing to have proceeded to more advanced stages in the Excited class than the CKB. The absence of distant TNOs implies that any distant (60 AU) population must have less than the CKB mass in the form of objects 40 km or larger. The CKB population is sparser than theoretical estimates of the required precursor population for short period comets, but the Excited population could be a viable precursor population.Comment: Revised version accepted to the Astronomical Journal. Numerical results are very slightly revised. Implications for the origins of short-period comets are substantially revised, and tedious material on statistical tests has been collected into a new Appendi

Instrumentation of sampling aircraft for measurement of launch vehicle effluents

An aircraft was selected and instrumented to measure effluents emitted from large solid propellant rockets during launch activities. The considerations involved in aircraft selection, sampling probes, and instrumentation are discussed with respect to obtaining valid airborne measurements. Discussions of the data acquisition system used, the instrument power system, and operational sampling procedures are included. Representative measurements obtained from an actual rocket launch monitoring activity are also presented

Experiments On Delayed Failure During Galvanizing Of Flame-Cut Structural Steels

Cracks have occasionally been found after hot-dip galvanizing of flame-cut structural beams. A project has been completed at CANMET to find the causes of this problem. Experiments have been designed to measure the time-to-failure of notched samples under near-constant load. Cracking during galvanizing is caused by liquid-metal embrittlement, and occurs for critical combinations of stress and susceptible material. Sources of stress are residual stresses including those from flame cutting, and thermal stresses from thermal gradients during hot dipping. Material susceptibility is related primarily to surface hardness, and correlates well with micro-hardness measured at 100 micrometres depth. Remedial measures to eliminate cracking require either reduction of the hardness below a critical level (270 Vickers), or reduction of residual and thermal stresses

Methods for comparative evaluation of propulsion system designs for supersonic aircraft

The propulsion system comparative evaluation study was conducted to define a rapid, approximate method for evaluating the effects of propulsion system changes for an advanced supersonic cruise airplane, and to verify the approximate method by comparing its mission performance results with those from a more detailed analysis. A table look up computer program was developed to determine nacelle drag increments for a range of parametric nacelle shapes and sizes. Aircraft sensitivities to propulsion parameters were defined. Nacelle shapes, installed weights, and installed performance was determined for four study engines selected from the NASA supersonic cruise aircraft research (SCAR) engine studies program. Both rapid evaluation method (using sensitivities) and traditional preliminary design methods were then used to assess the four engines. The method was found to compare well with the more detailed analyses

Measuring and Analysing the Chain of Implicit Trust: AStudy of Third-party Resources Loading

The web is a tangled mass of interconnected services, whereby websites import a range of external resources from various third-party domains. The latter can also load further resources hosted on other domains. For each website, this creates a dependency chain underpinned by a form of implicit trust between the first-party and transitively connected third parties. The chain can only be loosely controlled as first-party websites often have little, if any, visibility on where these resources are loaded from. This article performs a large-scale study of dependency chains in the web to find that around 50% of first-party websites render content that they do not directly load. Although the majority (84.91%) of websites have short dependency chains (below three levels), we find websites with dependency chains exceeding 30. Using VirusTotal, we show that 1.2% of these third parties are classified as suspicious—although seemingly small, this limited set of suspicious third parties have remarkable reach into the wider ecosystem. We find that 73% of websites under-study load resources from suspicious third parties, and 24.8% of first-party webpages contain at least three third parties classified as suspicious in their dependency chain. By running sandboxed experiments, we observe a range of activities with the majority of suspicious JavaScript codes downloading malware

Flight Mechanics and Control of Escape Manoeuvres in Hummingbirds. I. Flight Kinematics

Hummingbirds are nature’s masters of aerobatic manoeuvres. Previous research shows that hummingbirds and insects converged evolutionarily upon similar aerodynamic mechanisms and kinematics in hovering. Herein, we use three-dimensional kinematic data to begin to test for similar convergence of kinematics used for escape flight and to explore the effects of body size upon manoeuvring. We studied four hummingbird species in North America including two large species (magnificent hummingbird, Eugenes fulgens, 7.8 g, and blue-throated hummingbird, Lampornis clemenciae, 8.0 g) and two smaller species (broad-billed hummingbird, Cynanthus latirostris, 3.4 g, and black-chinned hummingbirds Archilochus alexandri, 3.1 g). Starting from a steady hover, hummingbirds consistently manoeuvred away from perceived threats using a drastic escape response that featured body pitch and roll rotations coupled with a large linear acceleration. Hummingbirds changed their flapping frequency and wing trajectory in all three degrees of freedom on a stroke-by-stroke basis, likely causing rapid and significant alteration of the magnitude and direction of aerodynamic forces. Thus it appears that the flight control of hummingbirds does not obey the ‘helicopter model’ that is valid for similar escape manoeuvres in fruit flies. Except for broad-billed hummingbirds, the hummingbirds had faster reaction times than those reported for visual feedback control in insects. The two larger hummingbird species performed pitch rotations and global-yaw turns with considerably larger magnitude than the smaller species, but roll rates and cumulative roll angles were similar among the four species

Influence of propulsion system size, shape, and location on supersonic aircraft design

The effects of various propulsion system parameters on the characteristics of a supersonic transport were investigated. The effects of arbitrarily scaling engine size on wave drag, friction drag, drag-due-to-lift, wing sizing, airplane balance, and airplane weight were studied. These evaluations were made for two families of nacelle shapes, resulting from typical turbojet and turbofan installations. Also examined were effects of nacelle location, and the wing camber plane deformations required to cancel the nacelle interference pressure field at cruise Mach number (2.7 M) were determined. The most drag-sensitive parameter is found to be nacelle shape. Similarly, wing deformation requirements are found to be primarily affected by nacelle shape. Effects of engine size variations are noted primarily in airplane gross weight

Flight Mechanics and Control of Escape Manoeuvres in Hummingbirds. II. Aerodynamic Force Production, Flight Control and Performance Limitations

The superior manoeuvrability of hummingbirds emerges from complex interactions of specialized neural and physiological processes with the unique flight dynamics of flapping wings. Escape manoeuvring is an ecologically relevant, natural behaviour of hummingbirds, from which we can gain understanding into the functional limits of vertebrate locomotor capacity. Here, we extend our kinematic analysis of escape manoeuvres from a companion paper to assess two potential limiting factors of the manoeuvring performance of hummingbirds: (1) muscle mechanical power output and (2) delays in the neural sensing and control system. We focused on the magnificent hummingbird (Eugenes fulgens, 7.8 g) and the black-chinned hummingbird (Archilochus alexandri, 3.1 g), which represent large and small species, respectively. We first estimated the aerodynamic forces, moments and the mechanical power of escape manoeuvres using measured wing kinematics. Comparing active-manoeuvring and passive-damping aerodynamic moments, we found that pitch dynamics were lightly damped and dominated by the effect of inertia, while roll dynamics were highly damped. To achieve observed closed-loop performance, pitch manoeuvres required faster sensorimotor transduction, as hummingbirds can only tolerate half the delay allowed in roll manoeuvres. Accordingly, our results suggested that pitch control may require a more sophisticated control strategy, such as those based on prediction. For the magnificent hummingbird, we estimated that escape manoeuvres required muscle mass-specific power 4.5 times that during hovering. Therefore, in addition to the limitation imposed by sensorimotor delays, muscle power could also limit the performance of escape manoeuvres