Originally Posted by
bearfoil
[B]ChristiaanJ
Your water sheet on glass, was that in re: Laminar flow?
No. It was a very simple way of demonstrating subsonic and supersonic flow by way of a 2D analogy of wave effects in a very thin sheet of water running down a more-or-less inclined sheet of glass.
It was so simple I replicated it (as a teenager) in a washbasin....
It is very much like the long-spun-out analogies we tend to use to describe the "sound barrier", and shock waves and the sonic boom, like dropping a stone in a pond, then moving a stick along a water surface at various speeds, then looking at a skiff in a canal, and looking at the waves hitting the bank.
But that simple gadget "showed it all".... even the differences between thin and thick wings by placing different 2D shapes in the stream.
Since then, for me the "sound barrier" was no longer a mystery, even if I didn't learn the maths until much, much later.
Oh, and it also told me, even then, about the difficulities of building transsonic windtunnels....
CJ