ALBERT

Description: The Committee was requested to investigate the effect of various types of rivet heads on hydrodynamic resistance. The proposal was made to obtain the resistance of the various types of rivets by tests of planing surfaces on which the full size rivets would be arranged. The testing methods, results and conclusions are given.

Description: The drag and the power cost associated with the changing of the nose of a nacelle from a streamline shape to a conventional N.A.C.A. cowling shape was investigated in the N.A.C.A. 20-foot tunnel. Full-scale propellers and nacelles were used. The increment of drag associated with the change of nose shapes was found to be critically dependent on the afterbody of the nacelle. Two streamline afterbodies were tested. The results fo the tests with the more streamlined afterbody showed that the added drag due to the open-nose cowling was only one-fourth of the drag increase obtained with the other afterbody. The results of this research indicate that the power cost, in excess of that with a streamline nose, of using an N.A.C.A. cowling in front of a well-designed afterbody to enclose a 1,500-horsepower engine in an airplane with a speed of 300 miles per hour amounts to 1.5 percent of the engine power. If the open-nose cowling is credited with 1 percent because it cools the front of the cylinders, the non-useful power cost amounts to only 0.5 percent of the engine power.

Description: Profile-drag coefficients published from tests in the N.A.C.A. variable-density tunnel (Technical Reports Nos. 460, 537, 586, and 610, references 1 to 4) have tended to appear high as compared with results from the N.A.C.A. full-scale tunnel (Technical Report No. 530, reference 5) and from foreign sources (references 6 to 8). Such discrepancies were considered in Technical Report No. 586, and corrections for turbulence and tip effects were derived that tended to reduce the profile-drag coefficients, particularly for the thicker airfoils. The corrected profile-drag coefficients, designated by the lower-case symbol cdo as contrasted with the older CDO, have been employed in the airfoil reports published since Technical Report No. 460, but even these corrected results continued to appear high, particularly for the thicker sections. The important practical result is that a smaller increase of drag with airfoil thickness is indicated, which may be of primary importance to the airplane designer in choosing the optimum airfoil sections for actual wings. Further investigations of this subject were, of course, undertaken, one of the most important being an investigation of three symmetrical sections N.A.C A. 0009, 0012, and 0018 under conditions of low turbulence in the full-scale tunnel. Preliminary results from this investigation also indicate a smaller increase in drag with airfoil thickness than the results from the variable-density tunnel. Furthermore, comparative tests made in the two tunnels by applying strings to the surface of the N.A.C.A. 0012 airfoil to move the transition point to a predetermined position indicated that the effective reynolds Number concept would account approximately for the drag as affected by the position of transition from laminar to turbulent flow in the boundary layer.