Scientists Almost Completely Reduce Drag in Water
Scientists at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia, University of Melbourne in Australia, and Institute of High Performance Computing in Singapore have worked together to develop two different, yet effective, ways of reducing 90% of the drag on objects moving through water. The findings were published in Science Advances.
In the first experiment, researchers heated a 2-centimeter-wide ball to approximately 750 degrees fahrenheit and heated a deep pool of water to approximately 200 degrees fahrenheit. They found the ball immediately boiled the water as it entered the liquid, which “created a stable layer of water vapor around the ball, encasing it in gas and reducing the drag,” Johnathan O’Callaghan reported.
In the second experiment, the ball was covered with a water-repellent coating and dropped into room-temperature water. Researchers found the repellent maintained a similar layer between the ball and the water. O’Callaghan writes that this method is more appealing because it works at room temperature.
This is the largest reduction in drag accomplished to date.
