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Credit: Image: Mass Communication Specialist Seaman Apprentice Cameron Bramham/U.S. Navy/DoD
Super-stealthy submarines may one day glide through the water without creating a wake, if a plan to channel fluid intelligently around objects can be made to work.
A vehicle moving through a fluid normally disturbs the medium in two ways. First, some of the fluid gets dragged along with the vehicle, sapping its energy and slowing it down. Second, a turbulent wake forms behind it where fluid rushes in to fill the vacant space. The churning fluid in the wake in turn creates noise that reveals the vehicle's presence.
But channelling the fluid around the object in just the right way could solve both problems at once.
To do this, Yaroslav Urzhumov and David Smith of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, propose encasing it in a mesh shell.
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