Those wingtip vortices cause a lot of drag and effect fuel mileage pretty heavily.
That's why you see winglets (those little upturned tips on the wings) on pretty much all new aircraft. My senior thesis was to study the effects or a triple winglet (85°, 60°, 45°) on fuel economy and induced drag on a standard NACA airfoil. I wish I had access to that hard drive. It was a cool hypothesis and we got some awesome pictures and wind tunnel data. That computer is sitting in a basement in Arnold, MD. I wonder if it would even fire up after 8.5 years?
That's why you see winglets (those little upturned tips on the wings) on pretty much all new aircraft. My senior thesis was to study the effects or a triple winglet (85°, 60°, 45°) on fuel economy and induced drag on a standard NACA airfoil. I wish I had access to that hard drive. It was a cool hypothesis and we got some awesome pictures and wind tunnel data. That computer is sitting in a basement in Arnold, MD. I wonder if it would even fire up after 8.5 years?
"There remain four irreducible objections to religious faith: that it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, that because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum servility with the maximum of solipsism, that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression, and that it is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking." ~Christopher Hitchens, god is not Great
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