DAMP Blog

AE 333 - Aerodynamics

 
  • Dec 26, 2020

Autumn 2020

Prof. Vineet Nair and Prof. Viren Menezes

Author: Vishnu Shankar

Pre-requisite courses: None

Pre-requisite skills: AE 152 and AE 225

Course Content:

  • Airfoils, wings and their nomenclature; lift, drag and pitching moment coefficients; centre of pressure and aerodynamic centre.

  • Potential flow Analysis; Scalar and vector fields, velocity potential, line, surface and volume integrals, circulation and lift generation, Kutta-Joukowski theorem.

  • Method of superposition, thin airfoil theory, source and vortex methods. Subsonic compressible flow past airfoils; Critical Mach number, drag divergence Mach number, supercritical airfoils, effect of sweep, area rule.

  • Full and perturbation velocity potential formulations

  • Prandtl-Glauert compressibility corrections.

  • Transonic flow past airfoils, transonic similarity rules; Supersonic flow past airfoils, linearized supersonic flow, shock expansion method.

  • Potential flow over lifting wing; lifting line theory method, slender body theory, panel method, variation of lift and drag

  • coefficients in subsonic flows with angle of attack, Reynolds number, thickness-to-chord ratio;

  • Supersonic flow over airfoils and wings; subsonic/supersonic leading edge.

  • Hypersonic flows, real gas effects, Newtonian theory, lift and drag in hypersonic flows.

Course Evaluation Structure: Surprise Quizzes + Assignments + EndSem + Project

Quizzes/Midsem/Endsem papers Difficulty: 4/5

Average Time Commitment: The first half requires atleast 3 hours, the second half requires not more than 1 hour

Course Evaluation Structure: The first half of the course was taught by Prof Vineeth Nair and the second by Prof Viren Menezes. The first half had 5 quizzes and best 4 were considered. The second half had 3 quizzes with different weightages.

General funda: Be attentive in the first half of the course, and take proper notes in the class. First 2-3 classes are pretty basic but after that every lecture is difficult to grasp but intellectually stimulating if you like fluid dynamics. The latter half is intuitive and easy to grasp.

The first half of the course is difficult, if you don’t solve some challenging problems before appearing for quizzes, you can easily get a zero. The quizzes were tough, but with practice it becomes fun. So the average marks in the first half is pretty low. So read and understand properly before going to next classes. Only 2 students got an AA because many students lost marks in the first half of the course. The second half of the course is easy, quizzes are easy, but be through with Viren Sir’s notes and a little reading of Aerodynamics should be sufficient. Everyone scores in this half, so the first half of the course is the hard nut to crack!

Who should do this course: A core course for Aero peeps, anyone interested in the mathematical formulation of flow over wings/aircrafts can take this course.

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