A comprehensive and highly accessible hands-on textbook filled with chapter objectives, examples, practice problems, and sample tests, featuring a new, dedicated online aero-calculator

In Elements of Aerodynamics, Professor Oscar Biblarz delivers a concise and fundamentals-oriented approach to aerodynamics suitable for both undergraduate and graduate-level students. The text offers numerous problems, examples, and check tests, allowing students to gain and cement their knowledge through hands-on practice.

Using a unique blend of fundamentals, the book provides readers with a new approach to ideal high-lift airfoils including applications designed to complement the theory. It covers the most vital information on incompressible and compressible flow over two-dimensional and three-dimensional wings. A companion website that includes an interactive aero-calculator and additional student resources makes this a suitable text for online, hybrid, and distance learning.

Readers will also find:

• A concise introduction to units and notation with more correct formulations of the force coefficients along with proper usage of other dimensionless coefficients in aerodynamics, featuring descriptions of airflow as an incompressible and compressible but low-viscosity medium past streamlined wings
• Comprehensive re-evaluation of the fundamentals of fluid dynamics, including the differential control volume approach and formulation of lift, drag, and pitching moments for thin, attached boundary layers over slender wings at high angles of attack
• Practical applications of mass, momentum, and energy relations, derived from Euler’s equation, Bernoulli’s equation, and the Kutta-Joukowski theorem
• Selected special treatment of transonic and hypersonic aerodynamic aspects, including supercritical airfoils, the non-linear small perturbation potential equation, and hypersonic lift and drag with the Newtonian theory approximation

Well-suited for students enrolled in an introductory aerodynamics course as part of an engineering program, Elements of Aerodynamics will also earn a place in the libraries of physics students and those interested in basic fluid mechanics.

Oscar Biblarz is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California, USA. He has over 35 years’ experience teaching and researching aerospace propulsion and fluid mechanics. He holds memberships in the AIAA and the APS. He is coauthor of Rocket Propulsion Elements (with George Sutton) and Fundamentals of Gas Dynamics (with R. D. Zucker), both published by Wiley.