3 ms·

To be fair, it is a VERY hard problem. 'Most' airplanes are designed in a laminar flow situation. Meaning that turbulence is just left out. This makes the calcu

To be fair, it is a VERY hard problem. 'Most' airplanes are designed in a laminar flow situation. Meaning that turbulence is just left out. This makes the calculations much easier, as you can set boundary conditions. In super-sonic conditions, the air is no-longer in-compressible, so the boundary conditions change and you have to add more variables to the equations. In hyper-sonic flow, the air itself is now a variable, as the molecules are split and recombine along the wing in ways we have not yet even empirically measured. This ads a complexity to the equations that is very large and the 'educated guess' of those chemistries on the wing becomes very important.

phkahler 9y ago
...as the molecules are split and recombine along the wing in ways we have not yet even empirically measured. I'm sure one can speculate. In the video they do talk about all the possible intermediate species, so one might have to add air molecules (which can break apart and add to the reactants) to the mix. But yeah, lots of unknowns. Doing experiments and comparing to the simulations should help figure it out. The problem has traditionally been an inability to do the simulations, but that's possible now.