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Lift Paper

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Submitted By tthunt01
Words 610
Pages 3
2016
Agwa Omot
Aerodynamics
2/25/2016
2016
Agwa Omot
Aerodynamics
2/25/2016
What is Lift
What is Lift

Lift

So if you are any normal person like myself prior this class, you may have understood that there was some magical force, which makes it possible to airplanes to lift off the ground and take flight. Working in the airline industry allowed for me to learn many different things about planes and how they work, but the one of the most interesting things that I have yet to master is Lift.
What is lift you may be asking yourself?
Before we can understand lift itself we most first know the other factors that are needed in order to get a plane off the ground and in flight. Four factors that affect flight are weight, lift, thrust and drag. Weight is the force of gravity. It acts in a downward direction toward the center of the Earth. Thrust is the force that propels a flying machine in the direction of motion. Drag is the force that acts opposite to the direction of the motion. Drag caused by friction and differences in air pressure. And then there is lift.
For lift, I decided to first look up how lift would be explained to someone of the lowest levels, and this is what I found. (Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, n.d.)
“Lift is the force that directly opposes the weight of an airplane and holds the airplane in the air. Lift is generated by every part of the airplane, but most of the lift on a normal airliner is generated by the wings. Lift is a mechanical aerodynamic force produced by the motion of the airplane through the air. Because lift is a force, it is a vector quantity, having both a magnitude and a direction associated with it. Lift acts through the center of pressure of the object and is directed perpendicular to the flow direction. There are several factors which affect the magnitude of lift.” (Hall, 2015)
Lift is created by the interaction and contact with a solid body of liquid or gas. It is a powered force. Many believe that is it generated by a forced field, and this is just not the case. In order for lift t occur solid body, airplane, must be in contact with fluid. If there is no fluid, there is no lift. All that is needed to create this lift is the flow of air, with is the fluid or gas that is most important.
In order to determine lift this is an equation that can help us. Lift depends on the density of the air, the square of the velocity, the air's viscosity and compressibility, the surface area over which the air flows, the shape of the body, and the body's inclination to the flow. In general, the dependence on body shape, inclination, air viscosity, and compressibility is very complex. One way to deal with complex needs is to characterize the dependence by a single variable. For lift, this variable is called the lift coefficient, designated "Cl." This allows us to collect all the effects, simple and complex, into a single equation. The lift equation states that lift L is equal to the lift coefficient Cl times the density r times half of the velocity V squared times the wing area A. (Hall, 2015)

References

Hall, N. (2015, May 5). NASA. Retrieved from https://www.grc.nasa.gov/: https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/airplane/lift1.html
Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. (n.d.). Retrieved from How things fly: http://howthingsfly.si.edu/forces-flight/four-forces

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