Hello, Shawn a. here,
When I was at the 100th anniversary of powered heavier than air flight at the 2003 Dayton airshow, I came across a tent with an exhibit from Romania. The exhibit had brochures with photos of the first jet powered aircraft- built in 1910!! By Henri Coanda, a Romanian. Evidently he had not thought of the ingenious and somewhat counterintuitive "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" approach of powering the compressor with a turbine in the exhaust flow, so his compressor was powered by what seems to have been a four cylinder piston engine. The air was compressed, fuel was added, and then ignited with jet-lke results. I'm not sure if the plane ever flew, but I did read that it taxied, and managed to do a "ground loop". Henri noticed the flames from his exhaust deflectors curving around them and coming back along the fuselage (which I assume was fabric), and decided to study the effect, which to this day is called the Coanda Effect- The tendancy of a fluid moving across a surface to follow the contours of that surface. Take a wine glass, put it upside down in the sink and center the water from the faucet on the base of the glass. At moderate water presure, the water will perform a 180 degree turn following the surface of the base of the glass, and flow smoothly down the stem covering the entire surface of the wine glass.
I was told that this effect is one of the three basic laws, or effects that make planes fly. Bernoulli's law,(the faster a fluid flows over a surface, the less pressure it exerts on that surface), Newtons law of action and reaction, and the Coanda Effect. I was also told that Einstein designed an aircraft wing, and out of 100 designs tested, his came in 97th-Third from the bottom! 96 wing designs submitted worked better than his!
If anyone has any info on Henri Coanda or his jet plane, Please post it-Thanks
Shawn
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