alt Hacker NewsAirfoil (2024)
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I say it every time it pops up; I’m a huge fan of ciechanow.ski!
They should receive an unlimited grant to produce educational content for the digital generation’s benefit.
He usually posts these brilliant explanations once or twice a year but nothing in 2025. I hope he finds the time to continue because the lessons are really really brilliantly told.
This is so cool. I've become more interested in aerodynamics since I've started watching F1 and reading Adrian Newey's book. This is such a great post, especially the diagrams in the velocity section.
That's the missing course for the first year of any Aerospace Engineering faculty.
Oh man. This guy. His work is simply some of the best explanation content I have ever seen
Ok that's long, one top line thing people tend to miss in these flying explanations is that airfoil shape isn't about some special sauce generating lift. A flat plate generates any amount of lift you want just fine. Airfoil design is about the ratio of lift to drag most importantly and then several more complex effects but NOT just generating lift. (stall speed, performance near and above the speed of sound, laminar/turbulent flow in different situations, what you can fit inside the wing, etc)
Bartosz Ciechanowski, the gift that keeps on giving.
I wish there was an infinite number of blogs that where this good.
Where can I find more articles where things are explained in this manner?
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wait what? this is goood!
I was just thinking the other day about how AI will pretty soon be able to create this kind of explainers on everything quite quickly.
Amazing times!
This is absolutely amazing.
For those of us programming nerds that want to play with aerodynamics, I can't recommend AeroSandbox enough. While the code is pretty obviously written for people who know their way around aerodynamics and not so much around programming, it is remarkably powerful. You can do all sorts of aerodynamic simulations and is coupled with optimization libraries that allow you to do incredible aerodynamic optimizations. It comes included with some pretty powerful open weight neural network models that can do very accurate estimates of aerodynamic characteristics of airfoils in a fraction of the time that top tier heuristic solvers (like xfoil) can do (which are already several orders of magnitude faster than CFD solvers).
https://github.com/peterdsharpe/AeroSandbox