The term came into use during World War II when pilots of high-speed fighter aircraft experienced the effects of compressibility. The sound barrier is still sometimes used today to refer to aircraft reaching supersonic flight. During WWII and immediately thereafter, a number of claims were made that the sound barrier had been broken in a dive.
About Sound barrier in brief
The sound barrier or sonic barrier is the sudden increase in aerodynamic drag and other undesirable effects experienced by an aircraft or other object when it approaches the speed of sound. Breaking this sound barrier produces a sonic boom. The term came into use during World War II when pilots of high-speed fighter aircraft experienced the effects of compressibility. The sound barrier is still sometimes used today to refer to aircraft reaching supersonic flight. During WWII and immediately thereafter, a number of claims were made that the sound barrier had been broken in a dive. The majority of these purported events can be dismissed as errors in instrumentation. At high speed, various air pressure differences on the fuselage produce a high speed figure at the nose and near the side of the aircraft, typically 0.7 Mach 7. At low speed, the typical air speed figure is 0.5 Mach 7 or 0.6 Mach 7, and this figure can be as high as 0.8 Mach 7 in some cases. In dry air at 20 °C, theSpeed of sound is 343 metres per second. Some common whips such as the bullwhip or stockwhip are able to move faster than sound: the tip of the whip exceeds this speed and causes a sharp crack. Meteors entering the Earth’s atmosphere usually, if not always, descend faster thansound. Thetip of the propeller on many early aircraft may reach supersonIC speeds, producing a noticeable buzz that differentiates such aircraft. This is undesirable, as the transonic air movement creates disruptive shock waves and turbulence.
It is due to these effects that propellers are known to suffer from dramatically decreased performance as they approach the speed. Nevertheless, propeller aircraft were able to approach the critical Mach number in a Dive. This led to numerous crashes for a variety of reasons, including the Mitsubishi Zero, in which pilots flew at full power into the terrain because the rapidly increasing forces acting on the control surfaces of their aircraft overpowered them. A similar problem is thought to have been the cause of the 1943 crash of the BI-1 rocket aircraft in the Soviet Union. Some paleobiologists report that, based on computer models of their biomechanical capabilities, certain long-tailed dinosaurs such as Brontosaurus, Apatosaurus, and Diplodocus may have been able to flick their tails at su personic speeds, creating a cracking sound. This finding is theoretical and disputed by others in the field. The concept of a \”barrier\” making it difficult for an aircraft to exceed the speedof sound is as physical as a physical wall. Erroneous news reports caused most people to envision a sound barrier in which a suPersonic aircraft needed to break with a sharp needle nose on the front fuselage. But experts’ products’ products routinely exceeded Mach 1, but the barrier is not as dangerous to exceed as aerodynamic engineers and aerodynamic designers discussed after World War 2. The barrier can be easily broken with the help of a specialised instrumentation system.
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This page is based on the article Sound barrier published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 09, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
