Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Lift-induced drag
Summary
In aerodynamics, lift-induced drag, induced drag, vortex drag, or sometimes drag due to lift, is an aerodynamic drag force that occurs whenever a moving object redirects the airflow coming at it. This drag force occurs in airplanes due to wings or a lifting body redirecting air to cause lift and also in cars with airfoil wings that redirect air to cause a downforce. It is symbolized as , and the lift-induced drag coefficient as .
For a constant amount of lift, induced drag can be reduced by increasing airspeed. A counter-intuitive effect of this is that, up to the speed-for-minimum-drag, aircraft need less power to fly faster. Induced drag is also reduced when the wingspan is higher, or for wings with wingtip devices.
The total aerodynamic force acting on a body is usually thought of as having two components, lift and drag. By definition, the component of force parallel to the oncoming flow is called drag; and the component perpendicular to the oncoming flow is called lift. At practical angles of attack the lift greatly exceeds the drag.
Lift is produced by the changing direction of the flow around a wing. The change of direction results in a change of velocity (even if there is no speed change), which is an acceleration. To change the direction of the flow therefore requires that a force be applied to the fluid; the total aerodynamic force is simply the reaction force of the fluid acting on the wing.
An aircraft in slow flight at a high angle of attack will generate an aerodynamic reaction force with a high drag component. By increasing the speed and reducing the angle of attack, the lift generated can be held constant while the drag component is reduced. At the optimum angle of attack, total drag is minimised. If speed is increased beyond this, total drag will increase again due to increased .
When producing lift, air below the wing is at a higher pressure than the air pressure above the wing. On a wing of finite span, this pressure difference causes air to flow from the lower surface, around the wingtip, towards the upper surface.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.