Method of Operation
Vortex generators are most often used to delay flow separation. To solve this problem, they are often placed on the external surfaces of vehicles. On aircraft they are installed on the front third of a wing in order to maintain steady airflow over the control surfaces at the trailing edge. They are typically rectangular or triangular, about 80% as tall as the boundary layer, and run in spanwise lines near the thickest part of the wing. They can be seen on the wings and vertical tails of many airliners. Vortex generators are positioned obliquely so that they have an angle of attack with respect to the local airflow.
A vortex generator creates a tip vortex which draws energetic, rapidly-moving air from outside the slow-moving boundary layer into contact with the aircraft skin. The boundary layer normally thickens as it moves along the aircraft surface, reducing the effectiveness of trailing-edge control surfaces; vortex generators can be used to remedy this problem, among others, by "re-energizing the boundary layer".
Read more about this topic: Vortex Generator
Famous quotes containing the words method of, method and/or operation:
“Methinks the human method of expression by sound of tongue is very elementary, & ought to be substituted for some ingenious invention which should be able to give vent to at least six coherent sentences at once.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“I have a new method of poetry. All you got to do is look over your notebooks ... or lay down on a couch, and think of anything that comes into your head, especially the miseries.... Then arrange in lines of two, three or four words each, don’t bother about sentences, in sections of two, three or four lines each.”
—Allen Ginsberg (b. 1926)
“An absolute can only be given in an intuition, while all the rest has to do with analysis. We call intuition here the sympathy by which one is transported into the interior of an object in order to coincide with what there is unique and consequently inexpressible in it. Analysis, on the contrary, is the operation which reduces the object to elements already known.”
—Henri Bergson (1859–1941)