Quote:
Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard
I believe if the air velocity is 4X as high, then the drag does scale.
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My brain struggles with this. I've read about Reynold's scaling. Here's my puzzle. Drag force is directly proportional to area and the square of velocity.
A 1/4-th scale model should have 1/16-th the area of full scale. Speed is supposed to be 4X for the scale model. That term squares to 16X which cancels the 1/16-th area term. The resulting "force" looks the same for both the full and small scale vehicles. But since the area is reduced doesn't that mean pressures would be 16X on the 1/4-th scale model by comparison?
This does not seem to compute. What am I missing?