Prandtl's Tripped Science vs Boeing Max

Prandtl making tripped experiments

Danger of tripping 

Ludwig Prandtl is viewed as the Father of Modern Fluid Mechanics because he offered a resolution of the pressing problems of fluid mechanics in the beginning of the 20th century including d'Alembert's paradox through his discovery of the laminar and turbulent boundary layer in wall bounded fluid flow.

The legacy of Prandtl is described in Prandtl-Essentials of Fluid Mechanics edited by Herbert Oertel, Springer 2004, with the following introduction

• The development of modern fluid mechanics is closely connected to the name of its founder, Ludwig Prandtl. 
• In 1904 it was his famous article on fluid motion with very small friction that introduced boundary-layer theory. 
• His article on airfoil theory, published the following decade, formed the basis for the calculation of friction drag, heat transfer, and flow separation.
• Prandtl was particularly successful in bringing together theory and experiment, with the experiments serving to verify his theoretical ideas. 
• It was this that gave Prandtl’s experiments their importance and precision. His famous experiment with the tripwire, through which he discovered the turbulent boundary layer and the effect of turbulence on flow separation, is one example. 
• The tripwire was not merely inspiration, but rather was the result of consideration of discrepancies in Eiffel’s drag measurements on spheres. 
• Two experiments with different tripwire positions were enough to establish the generation of turbulence and its effect on the flow separation. For his experiments Prandtl developed wind tunnels and measuring apparatus, such as the Göttingen wind tunnel and the Prandtl stagnation tube. 
• His scientific results often seem to be intuitive, with the mathematical derivation present only to provide service to the physical understanding, although it then does indeed deliver the decisive result and the simplified physical model. 
• According to a comment by Werner Heisenberg, Prandtl was able to “see” the solutions of differential equations without calculating them.

To give the highlighted parts perspective recall that when I was awarded the Prandtl Medal in 2014 by ECCOMAS, I stated that I would receive the medal under the condition that it would be expressed that the New Theory/Computation of Flight developed together with Johan Hoffman and Johan Jansson showed that Prandtl had misled modern fluid mechanics into a fruitless search for the origin lift and drag of an airplane wing in a boundary layer so thin that it could never be resolved in computation. This was not allowed to be expressed and the result was that I did not accept to receive the medal. The story can be read here.

The New Theory of Flight supported by refined computations since 2014 shows that contrary to Prandtl wall bounded slightly viscous flow can be modeled by a slip boundary condition without any boundary layer, which makes the flow computable as time variable turbulent flow. There is thus now massive evidence that Prandtl was wrong, seriously wrong. 

Signs that there is something fishy with Prandtl's boundary layers as the origin of drag and lift can be seen in the above highlights: 

1. Prandtl use a tripwire to change the flow to fit what he could "see" without mathematics and computation. 
2. His results were intuitive.     

The effect of artificially tripping the flow in experiments has led to the misconception that skin friction drag is a major part of total drag with form/pressure drag a minor part, viewed to be relevant  also for an airplane wing without tripping device. The New Theory gives hard evidence that this is seriously misleading by computing drag and lift with slip in close accordance to observations.

The lesson is that if you rely on intuition rather than correct mathematics and are ready to trip experiments to fit, then you can end up with something with little connection to reality. Evidently Prandtl did so. The consequences are severe with the Boeing Max debacle a result of misconceived engineering computation following Prandtl.

PS The following question/answer appears on FAQ at Secret ion Flight:

Q30: Why is the flow tripped by a wire, strip or ribbon in wind tunnel measurements of drag of wing, when a real wing does not have any tripping device and the tripping thus appears to be artficial?

A30: The rationale presented is that the tripping will force the development of a turbulent boundary layer with substantial skin friction,  which according to Prandtl should be present. The tripping is thus done to artificially fit reality to theory, which is opposite to the basic principle of science to fit theory to reality. In the New Theory, which fits with untripped experiments, the flow of air meets the wing with a slip boundary condition modeling vanishing skin friction.