In: Mechanical Engineering
Answer
The Coandă effect is the tendency of a fluid jet to stay attached to a convex surface.
It is named after Romanian inventor Henri Coandă, who described it as "the tendency of a jet of fluid emerging from an orifice to follow an adjacent flat or curved surface and to entrain fluid from the surroundings so that a region of lower pressure develops.
Application
The Coandă effect has important applications in various high-lift devices on aircraft, where air moving over the wing can be "bent down" towards the ground using flaps and a jet sheet blowing over the curved surface of the top of the wing.
The bending of the flow results in aerodynamic lift.
The flow from a high speed jet engine mounted in a pod over the wing produces increased lift by dramatically increasing the velocity gradient in the shear flow in the boundary layer.
In this velocity gradient, particles are blown away from the surface, thus lowering the pressure there. C