Aerospace engineering researchers featured on cover of Physics of Fluids

One hundred years. That’s how long the momentum-integral approach, used to solve all types of boundary layer problems, has been taught to students across the many engineering disciplines that cover fluid mechanics and aerodynamics–from aerospace to mechanical and passing through civil, biomedical and chemical engineering.

Joseph Majdalani, professor and Francis Chair of Excellence in the Auburn University Department of Aerospace Engineering, is the latest to improve upon the Kármán-Pohlhausen approach to momentum-integral theory, first established in 1921. In collaboration with his postdoctoral scholar, Li-Jun Xuan, Majdalani has recently published a feature cover article in the Physics of Fluids journal explaining the so-called Pohlhausen paradox. Not only have Majdalani and Xuan explained the reason for the paradox, they have discovered an alternative fourth-order polynomial that outperforms Pohlhausen’s by one order of magnitude.

Read more about their findings here.