Turbulence

Have you ever been on an airplane? Chances are that if you have ridden an airplane, you have also probably felt turbulence caused by air outside of the craft, and as common as turbulence is on airplane trips, today only a few deductive reasonings have been formulated in regards to why turbulence even happens.

Some properties of turbulence that are necessary to understand are that turbulence occurs to any object that is composed of any type of flowing fluid or gas, that turbulence is chaotic rather than random, and that turbulent motion have very different sized whirls that are called “Eddies”.

So why does turbulence even occur? Remember that turbulence occurs to any object composed of any type of fluid. Every flowing fluid and gas also has the opposing force of Inertia and Viscosity working upon them. Inertia is the tendency of an object to remain unchanged, and in the case of liquids, the tendency to keeping everything moving. Inertia causes disruptions in fluids while Viscosity is a force with a tendency to work against the disruption caused by Inertia. Viscosity is usually the overpowering force in thick substances like liquid glue, but Inertia is much more overpowering in substances like water or apple juice. In objects like airplanes their is a lot of substances (both liquid and gas) that are overpowered by Inertia, and since Inertia is the force that causes disruption, it also causes chaotic turbulence.

The turbulence an object experiences is calculated by finding the Reynolds Number Re = VD/v where V is the velocity of an object, D is the size of that object, and v is viscosity of the object. V times D is also equal to the Inertia of the object, and therefor the Reynolds Number is a display of the rate of an objects Inertia over its Viscosity. The higher an object’s Reynolds Number, the higher is the Inertia and the more powerful is the turbulence that the object faces. The lower an object’s Reynolds Number, the lower is the Inertia, and the less powerful is the turbulence that the object faces.

Turbulence is a very scary thing on long flights, which is why we as scientists understand its many aspects. Maybe one day you’ll figure out how to stop turbulence on an airplane trip altogether.

Aircraft flying in the eye of Hurricane Caroline

Picture Source: usatoday.com