Shark Skin
Research Could Reduce Airplane Drag By 30 Percent
by Mary Grady, News Writer, Editor
by Mary Grady, News Writer, Editor
It may seem obvious that the surface of an airplane
should be as smooth as possible to minimize aerodynamic drag,
but that's not really the case. A bit of roughness can break
up the boundary layer and improve efficiency. Sharks, with
skin formed of rough scales called denticles
(http://www.elasmo-research.org/education/white_shark/scales.htm),
can slip through the water at speeds of up to 60 mph with
minimal drag. This week, The Lindbergh Foundation
(http://www.lindberghfoundation.org) awarded a grant to Dr.
Amy Lang, at the University of Alabama
(http://uanews.ua.edu/anews2007/nov07/shark112907.htm), to
study whether the surface texture on the skin of fast-swimming
sharks, capable of bristling their scales when in pursuit of
prey, could be mimicked and used to reduce the drag on
aircraft. "If we can successfully show there is a significant
effect, future applications to reduce drag of aircraft and
underwater vehicles could be possible," said Lang. The
technology has the potential to increase aerodynamic
efficiency up to 30 percent, with savings of billions of
dollars and substantial reductions in fuel burn and emissions.
Engineering
Project Explores Energy Conservation Through Shark
Research
byAllison Bridges
byAllison Bridges
TUSCALOOSA, Ala. – The stars of the “Jaws”
films–sharks–have recently become the subject of a University
of Alabama engineering research project. Conducted by Dr. Amy
Lang, assistant professor of aerospace engineering and
mechanics, the project explores energy conservation and
boundary layer control in regard to a shark’s surface.
The project findings will allow researchers to explore
natural solutions for the reduction of skin friction over
solid surfaces, which could result in new innovations and
applications concerning energy conservation. This research
will not only provide a greater understanding of the
evolutionary development of sharks, but it will also
investigate methods of flow control and drag reduction that
can be easily applied to mobile vehicles.
Research has shown the issue of reducing drag over
solid surfaces can save thousands of dollars. For example, it
is estimated that even a 1 percent reduction in drag can save
an airline company up to $200,000 and at least 25,000 gallons
of fuel per year per aircraft. The resulting reduction in
emissions into the air is equally impressive.
Funded through a National Science Foundation Small
Grant, the project is investigating the boundary layer flow
over a surface that mimics the skin of a fast-swimming shark.
The boundary layer is the area closest to the surface where
viscous conditions cause drag–in this instance a shark’s skin.
Lang hopes to explain why fast sharks that swim upwards
of 60 mph have smaller denticles, or scales, than slower shark
species. Evidence suggests that sharks with smaller denticles
have the ability to stick out their scales when they swim,
allowing them to swim faster and creating a unique surface
pattern on the skin that results in various mechanisms of
boundary layer control.
“We hope to explain how a shark’s skin controls the
boundary layer to decrease drag and swim faster,” said Lang.
“If we can successfully show there is a significant effect,
future applications to reduce drag of aircraft and underwater
vehicles could be possible.”
Lang’s research is being conducted using a water tunnel facility in Hardaway Hall. The water tunnel lab can increase the shark skin geometry by 100 times with a corresponding decrease in flow over the model. This makes the flow over the skin observable, and it allows for the visualization and measurement of flow using modern experimental techniques.
In addition to the National Science Foundation Small Grant, Lang recently received a Lindbergh Grant for this research project. Lindbergh Grants are made in amounts up to $10,580, a symbolic amount representing the cost of building Charles Lindbergh’s plane, the Spirit of St. Louis.
In 1837, The University of Alabama became one of the first five universities in the nation to offer engineering classes. Today, UA’s fully accredited College of Engineering has about 1,900 students and nearly 100 faculty. In the last seven years, students in the College have been named USA Today All-USA College Academic Team members, Goldwater scholars, Hollings scholars and Portz scholars.
The University of Alabama, a student-centered research university, is in the midst of a planned, steady enrollment growth with a goal of reaching 28,000 students by 2010. This growth, which is positively impacting the campus and the state's economy, is in keeping with UA's vision to be the university of choice for the best and brightest students. UA, the state's flagship university, is an academic community united in its commitment to enhancing the quality of life for all Alabamians.
Lang’s research is being conducted using a water tunnel facility in Hardaway Hall. The water tunnel lab can increase the shark skin geometry by 100 times with a corresponding decrease in flow over the model. This makes the flow over the skin observable, and it allows for the visualization and measurement of flow using modern experimental techniques.
In addition to the National Science Foundation Small Grant, Lang recently received a Lindbergh Grant for this research project. Lindbergh Grants are made in amounts up to $10,580, a symbolic amount representing the cost of building Charles Lindbergh’s plane, the Spirit of St. Louis.
In 1837, The University of Alabama became one of the first five universities in the nation to offer engineering classes. Today, UA’s fully accredited College of Engineering has about 1,900 students and nearly 100 faculty. In the last seven years, students in the College have been named USA Today All-USA College Academic Team members, Goldwater scholars, Hollings scholars and Portz scholars.
The University of Alabama, a student-centered research university, is in the midst of a planned, steady enrollment growth with a goal of reaching 28,000 students by 2010. This growth, which is positively impacting the campus and the state's economy, is in keeping with UA's vision to be the university of choice for the best and brightest students. UA, the state's flagship university, is an academic community united in its commitment to enhancing the quality of life for all Alabamians.
Skin of
the Teeth
Shark scales are tiny compared with those of teleosts
(bony fishes) and have a characteristic tooth-like structure.
Although they are often termed placoid ("plate-like") scales
in older texts, most biologists today prefer the more
descriptive phrase, dermal denticles (literally, "tiny skin
teeth"). These denticles typically have a broad basal plate, a
narrow stalk, and a broad, ridged or otherwise highly
sculptured crown. In general, the crowns of dermal denticles
have cusps pointing tailward, which is why a shark feels
relatively smooth if stroked from head-to-tail but sandpapery
coarse if stroked the other way. (An interesting exception is
the Basking Shark [Cetorhinus maximus], in which the crowns
seem to point every which way; Norwegians, who have
commercially harvested this species for decades, have come up
with a clever use for this peculiarity: they paste a strip of
Basking Shark skin on the soles of their boots, preventing
slippage on wet, rolling decks.) The White Shark is furnished
with dermal denticles, too, and it is worth taking a moment to
consider briefly their many functions.
Dermal Denticles of a White Shark (head to the left).
A. Dorsal(top) view of the crowns of three denticles.
B. Lateral (side) view of a single denticle.
Redrawn after Radcliffe (1916)
Dermal denticles are built on the same engineering
principles as the most durable of man-made compounds, such as
fibreglass and reinforced concrete. Embedding a hard material
inside a softer one combines the best properties of both,
providing the rigidity of the former without brittleness and
the plasticity of the latter without distortion. The dentine
layer of dermal denticles is composed of a hard, crystalline
mineral called apatite, embedded in a soft protein, our old
friend collagen. Due to their microstructure, dermal denticles
are about as hard as granite and as strong as steel. Not
surprisingly, dermal denticles afford sharks no small measure
of physical protection. Yet they do so without sacrificing
mobility, like a built-in suit of chainmail armor. The dermal
denticles of the White Shark have crowns shaped like miniature
horseshoe crabs, so tiny as to be barely visible to the naked
eye. These crowns overlap tightly, providing protection from
both large potential predators — including other Great Whites
— and tiny skin parasites.
The denticle crowns of the White Shark are highly sculptured, each with three longitudinal ridges that terminate in a rearward-pointing cusp. Although it may seem counter-intuitive for an aquatic animal to be anything but smooth as possible, there are actually sound hydrodynamic benefits to be gained from such sandpaper roughness. How strategic roughness can yield aero- and hydro-dynamic benefits has elicited a great deal of research in recent years. Consider the humble golf ball. Those characteristic dimples are not created equal: the indentations around the equator of the ball are actually slightly deeper than those at the poles. This deceptively simple design feature grants a golf ball in flight and with the proper backspin an additional two seconds of 'hang-time' — increasing driving range by as much as 80 feet (24 metres) — and reduces the incidence of hooks and slices by as much as 75%. Similarly, in fighter jets or fast ships, the secret to their phenomenal speed lies in fine, V-shaped grooves. These grooves must be very closely spaced — about as close together as the grooves on an old-fashioned phonograph record (Anyone remember those?). Such closely-spaced grooves appear to reduce drag by preventing eddies from coming in contact with the surface of a moving body. Nowadays, there is hardly an American military aircraft or vessel that does not somehow benefit from the fluid dynamic efficiency of incorporating strategically-placed, V-shaped grooves along the fuselage, hull, and foils. But, whenever there is a physical principle that provides an elegant solution to a practical environmental challenge, it seems that Nature always beats us to the punch. Collectively, the tiny, three-ridged dermal denticles of the White Shark create closely-spaced grooves similar to those on high-speed air or water craft. These denticles very probably impart similar drag-reducing properties to the shark. Thus, without understanding the first thing about golf balls or military craft, the White Shark has been employing many of the same fluid dynamics principles for millions of years.
In a short but fascinating 1982 paper, Wolf-Ernst Reif and his co-worker A. Dinkelacker reviewed the hydrodynamics of dermal denticles in fast-swimming sharks. Reif and Dinkelacker found that the crowns of dermal denticles in the Shortfin Mako and other fast-swimming sharks are smooth and almost ridgeless on the tip of the snout and leading (anterior) edges of the fins, but elsewhere on the body the crown ridges are quite steep, with depths one-half to two-thirds their width. They also found that the alignment of these crown ridges varies over the body, closely approximating path-of-least-resistance flow of water over the surface of the shark. The smoothness of denticles on the leading edges of the snout and fins offer the least resistance to these areas of minimal boundary layer thickness. In contrast, the alignment of crown ridges with the 'natural' flow-direction of water over the shark's body can be expected to maximize drag reduction by reducing turbulence, thereby preventing eddy formation. The arrangement of dermal denticles in the White Shark is probably very similar to that exhibited by the Shortfin Mako. Thus, like a dimpled golf ball, a grooved Great White may glide farther on a given amount of energy than would a smooth one.
In a 1986 paper, biologists William Raschi and Jennifer Elsom reviewed the drag-reduction properties of shark dermal denticles. Raschi and Elsom examined the denticles of 15 species of shark and found that those of fast-swimming pelagic species — such as the Shortfin Mako — are consistently smaller and lighter than those of sluggish or bottom-dwelling species. Therefore, the relatively small, light-weight dermal denticles of the White Shark are probably adapted for fast swimming more than armor-like protection — yet another compromise between form and function. In addition, they found that the Shortfin Mako and other fast-swimming species consistently had ridge characteristics nearer those values predicted as optimal for burst speeds. Raschi and Elsom also found that, despite growth-associated increases in the crown size of denticles, the height and spacing of the scales' longitudinal ridges remained nearly constant in all species examined. This suggests that some important functional feature may be maintained throughout a shark's life. That feature is very probably drag reduction — in a 1984 report, Raschi and ichthyologist Jack Musick discovered that the longitudinal ridge system created by shark dermal denticles is responsible for drag reductions as great as 8%. That percentage represents a substantial energy savings, and it seems unlikely that the White Shark would not take advantage of the benefits afforded by this mechanism.
There is at least one further benefit of sharks' hydrodynamically sculpted dermal denticles: stealth. Despite pioneer undersea explorer Jacques-Yves Cousteau's poetic description of the marine environment as a "silent world", the ocean is full of noise. Mournful songs of lonely whales, exuberant squeals and clicks of cavorting dolphins, multitudinous croaks and yaps of reproductively-ripe fishes, and the incessant, static-like chorus of snapping shrimps vie with the mechanical rumble of ocean-going ships and the frenetic buzz of speedboats. If you were to lower a hydrophone (underwater microphone) near a school of teleost fishes, you would quite easily hear the sloshing sounds of water turbulence, created by their swimming movements. The large, overlapping scales of teleosts are not nearly as hydrodynamically 'clean' as the dermal denticles of sharks. If you were to place the same hydrophone near a cruising shark, no such swimming sounds would be heard. Sharks are, literally, "silent hunters". For the Great White, this hydrodynamic side-effect probably confers tremendous advantages when stalking prey: the hapless fish or sea lion almost never hears the shark that caught it.
The denticle crowns of the White Shark are highly sculptured, each with three longitudinal ridges that terminate in a rearward-pointing cusp. Although it may seem counter-intuitive for an aquatic animal to be anything but smooth as possible, there are actually sound hydrodynamic benefits to be gained from such sandpaper roughness. How strategic roughness can yield aero- and hydro-dynamic benefits has elicited a great deal of research in recent years. Consider the humble golf ball. Those characteristic dimples are not created equal: the indentations around the equator of the ball are actually slightly deeper than those at the poles. This deceptively simple design feature grants a golf ball in flight and with the proper backspin an additional two seconds of 'hang-time' — increasing driving range by as much as 80 feet (24 metres) — and reduces the incidence of hooks and slices by as much as 75%. Similarly, in fighter jets or fast ships, the secret to their phenomenal speed lies in fine, V-shaped grooves. These grooves must be very closely spaced — about as close together as the grooves on an old-fashioned phonograph record (Anyone remember those?). Such closely-spaced grooves appear to reduce drag by preventing eddies from coming in contact with the surface of a moving body. Nowadays, there is hardly an American military aircraft or vessel that does not somehow benefit from the fluid dynamic efficiency of incorporating strategically-placed, V-shaped grooves along the fuselage, hull, and foils. But, whenever there is a physical principle that provides an elegant solution to a practical environmental challenge, it seems that Nature always beats us to the punch. Collectively, the tiny, three-ridged dermal denticles of the White Shark create closely-spaced grooves similar to those on high-speed air or water craft. These denticles very probably impart similar drag-reducing properties to the shark. Thus, without understanding the first thing about golf balls or military craft, the White Shark has been employing many of the same fluid dynamics principles for millions of years.
In a short but fascinating 1982 paper, Wolf-Ernst Reif and his co-worker A. Dinkelacker reviewed the hydrodynamics of dermal denticles in fast-swimming sharks. Reif and Dinkelacker found that the crowns of dermal denticles in the Shortfin Mako and other fast-swimming sharks are smooth and almost ridgeless on the tip of the snout and leading (anterior) edges of the fins, but elsewhere on the body the crown ridges are quite steep, with depths one-half to two-thirds their width. They also found that the alignment of these crown ridges varies over the body, closely approximating path-of-least-resistance flow of water over the surface of the shark. The smoothness of denticles on the leading edges of the snout and fins offer the least resistance to these areas of minimal boundary layer thickness. In contrast, the alignment of crown ridges with the 'natural' flow-direction of water over the shark's body can be expected to maximize drag reduction by reducing turbulence, thereby preventing eddy formation. The arrangement of dermal denticles in the White Shark is probably very similar to that exhibited by the Shortfin Mako. Thus, like a dimpled golf ball, a grooved Great White may glide farther on a given amount of energy than would a smooth one.
In a 1986 paper, biologists William Raschi and Jennifer Elsom reviewed the drag-reduction properties of shark dermal denticles. Raschi and Elsom examined the denticles of 15 species of shark and found that those of fast-swimming pelagic species — such as the Shortfin Mako — are consistently smaller and lighter than those of sluggish or bottom-dwelling species. Therefore, the relatively small, light-weight dermal denticles of the White Shark are probably adapted for fast swimming more than armor-like protection — yet another compromise between form and function. In addition, they found that the Shortfin Mako and other fast-swimming species consistently had ridge characteristics nearer those values predicted as optimal for burst speeds. Raschi and Elsom also found that, despite growth-associated increases in the crown size of denticles, the height and spacing of the scales' longitudinal ridges remained nearly constant in all species examined. This suggests that some important functional feature may be maintained throughout a shark's life. That feature is very probably drag reduction — in a 1984 report, Raschi and ichthyologist Jack Musick discovered that the longitudinal ridge system created by shark dermal denticles is responsible for drag reductions as great as 8%. That percentage represents a substantial energy savings, and it seems unlikely that the White Shark would not take advantage of the benefits afforded by this mechanism.
There is at least one further benefit of sharks' hydrodynamically sculpted dermal denticles: stealth. Despite pioneer undersea explorer Jacques-Yves Cousteau's poetic description of the marine environment as a "silent world", the ocean is full of noise. Mournful songs of lonely whales, exuberant squeals and clicks of cavorting dolphins, multitudinous croaks and yaps of reproductively-ripe fishes, and the incessant, static-like chorus of snapping shrimps vie with the mechanical rumble of ocean-going ships and the frenetic buzz of speedboats. If you were to lower a hydrophone (underwater microphone) near a school of teleost fishes, you would quite easily hear the sloshing sounds of water turbulence, created by their swimming movements. The large, overlapping scales of teleosts are not nearly as hydrodynamically 'clean' as the dermal denticles of sharks. If you were to place the same hydrophone near a cruising shark, no such swimming sounds would be heard. Sharks are, literally, "silent hunters". For the Great White, this hydrodynamic side-effect probably confers tremendous advantages when stalking prey: the hapless fish or sea lion almost never hears the shark that caught it.
A PASSIVE DRAG MODIFICATION SYSTEM
Abstract -- A
micro-array surface that provides for drag reduction. In one
aspect, an aerodynamic or hydrodynamic wall surface that is
configured to modify a fluid boundary layer on the surface
comprises at least one array of micro-cavities formed therein
the surface. In one example, the interaction of the
micro-cavities with the boundary layer of the fluid can delay
transition of the fluid over an identical smooth surface
without the micro-cavities.
US2007194178 // WO2008103663
Abstract --vThe
present invention is directed to a micro-array surface that
provides for either drag reduction or enhancement, hi one
aspect, an aerodynamic or hydrodynamic wall surface that is
configured to modify a fluid boundary layer on the surface
comprises at least one array of roughness elements disposed on
and extending therefrom the surface. In one example, the
interaction of the roughness elements with a turbulent
boundary layer of the fluid reduces the skin friction drag
coefficient of the surface over an identical smooth surface
without the roughness elements.