I'm sure most of you have seen this photo, or ones like it, showing a cone-shaped cloud of condensation around an aircraft. Some people I've met are skeptical that these photos are real; they suspect photoshopping. They are most definitely real – they're caused by a well-understood mechanism: the Prandtl-Glauert Effect (sometimes called the Prandtl-Glauert Singularity). I'm lucky enough to have seen this a few times myself, a few times at air shows, and a couple of times while in the U.S. Navy watching exercises involving fighters.
There's a very detailed (but no heavy math) explanation here, and a Wikipedia page here.
But the real reason for this post is to point you to a web site that's chock full of beautiful photos of the Prandtl-Glauert Effect – the best collection I've found...
No comments:
Post a Comment