Here we address some basic principles for low speed aerodynamic design. We will focus on aerodynamics in this collection of pages.
Aerodynamics is usually a difficult course in any curriculum and exploits the application of fluid mechanics to just air. This allows some assumptions, simplifications, and also introduces additional considerations like compressive flow, speed of sound etc. There are too many issues to do justice in this course.
We will only focus on airfoils and wings and understand some of the parameters useful for estimating aircraft performance.
The basic idea is the application of Newton's law to fluid flow problems. Since aerodynamic design depends on the details of flow, we need to describe the detailed behavior involved in fluid flows. Unlike the basic fluid mechanics course, this requires the description and establishment of the Newton's law in terms of differential equations, or non-linear partial differential equations.
These equations can only be solved by numerical computation. However, in aerodynamics, it is possible to reduce the difficulty of making idealizations, such as ideal flow, which decrease the difficulty of the solution. Ultimately, real viscous effects must be incorporated through researched fudge factors.