Paul Bowen’s photograph “Capturing the Mesmerizing Dance of Wingtip Vortices” is a work of art.
There are many amazing things in the fascinating field of fluid dynamics, but wingtip vortices are one of the most interesting. Photographer Paul Bowen did a great job capturing this shot, which shows off the intricate patterns that these vortices make.
The picture makes it easy to see the following vortices and downwash that an airplane in the air creates. In this particular scene, a Cessna Citation VI was flying just above a cloud bank over the beautiful Lake Tahoe. At an altitude of about 122 meters (400 feet) above the lake, the plane was moving at a speed of about 313 km/h, or 170 knots. The total weight of it was about 8,400 kilos.
As the following vortices fell over the fog layer, their downwash effect could be seen in the way the fog was warped. In the wake of the plane, this made a unique and interesting flow field. Paul Bowen took the picture while sitting in the tail gunner’s seat of a B-25 flying in line just above and in front of the Cessna. The picture shows the time when the Cessna starts a slow climb after flying level for a while, while some of the fog layer stays the same.
An airplane in the picture is a Cessna. Its wings span 16.3 meters and its area under the wings is 29 square meters. It was about 1.1×10^7, which is a measure of the flow properties, based on a mean aerodynamic chord of 2.1 meters.
This amazing picture, taken from the Gallery of Fluid Motion and shown in Physics of Fluids A, gives us an interesting look into the world of fluid dynamics. It shows how beautiful and complicated wingtip vortices are and how they affect their surroundings. We’d like to thank Hiroshi Higuchi from Syracuse University for his help and the Cessna Aircraft Company for the picture.
We can enjoy the beautiful displays of fluid dynamics in motion through the lens of Paul Bowen’s skilled photography. Wingtip vortices make beautiful designs that remind us of the amazing forces and events that are all around us and are just waiting to be studied and understood.
