New Theory of Flight Presented to the World

Simulation movie of airflow around a jumbojet in landing configuration at large angle of attack.

The revised version of New Theory of Flight has now been submitted to Journal of Mathematical Fluid Mechanics for expected swift publication.

This article together with my former students Johan Hoffman and Johan Jansson represents the summit of my scientific career as a combination of mathematical analysis and computation. The article asks for a major revision of text book aerodynamics and opens new roads to aerodynamic design. And it is not a joke…Finally, The Secret of Flight can be revealed to humanity.

Once the article has appeared in JMFM the new theory will be launched in a press release to media. Stay tuned….

Here is the Summary of article:

• The new theory shows that the miracle of flight is made possible by the combined effects of (i) incompressibility, (ii) slip boundary condition and (iii) 3d rotational slip separation, creating a flow around a wing which can be described as (iv) potential flow modified by 3d rotational separation. 
• The basic novelty of the theory is expressed in (iii) as a fundamental 3d flow phenomenon only recently discovered by advanced computation and analyzed mathematically, and thus is not present in the classical theory. 
• Finally, (iv) can be viewed as a realization in our computer age of Euler’s original dream to in his equations capture an unified theory of fluid flow. 
• The crucial conditions of (ii) a slip boundary condition and (iii) 3d rotational slip separation show to be safely satisfied by incompressible flow if the Reynolds number is larger than 106. For lower Reynolds numbers the new theory suggests analysis and design with focus on maintaining (ii) and (iii).