April 25, 2008 — Scientists believe submarines or aircraft covered with a shape-shifting skin would experience 50 percent less drag than conventional vehicles.
While it seems counterintuitive to reduce drag by wrinkling the surface of a craft, nature provides a precedent. "Dolphins induce their skin to wrinkle so water won’t stick to them," Dimitris Lagoudas at Texas A&M University told New Scientist.
Giving craft skin that can tweak its surface to impose order on chaotic airflow currents could dramatically cut the effect of drag, Lagoudas says.
Lagoudas says the shape-shifting skin approach would work best as cladding for submarines. "It would be feasible to use this on aircraft but more challenging," he told New Scientist. "The velocities are higher and so the traveling waves must be higher in frequency."
"It’s a novel technique that has been demonstrated to work under lab conditions," Jonathan Morrison at Imperial College London told New Scientist. "But implementing this in something the size of an aircraft would be pretty daunting."
The complexity of the morphing skin might deter designers worried about the consequences were it to fail during flight or an underwater mission, says Morrison.
But Morrison adds that the skin does not have to be so complex to be useful - corrugated skin with a fixed shape could also cut drag. "You could design it to be most effective while cruising," he says, for example the speed an aircraft maintains for most of its flight.
Static skin like that would also have to be designed not to work under some conditions, he adds. "When you’re coming to land you actually want the drag."
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