Lift: Looking to the Skies - Lesson 2

Have you ever wondered about the forces that keep airplanes up in the air? In this lesson, we will explore what generates the lift force that keeps airplanes flying.

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We can get an even better understanding of lift and how it works by performing another experiment. When engineers want to study the aerodynamic properties of a body, they use a wind tunnel. They analyze how the air moving through the wind tunnel passes over the body and generates the forces acting on it. In the following experiment, we will use a reproduction of a small wind tunnel to test the performance of a simple shape and understand the effect of lift on an airplane wing.

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Want to conduct your own lift experiment? Try building the paper airplane used in the video. Visit https://www.ansys.com/paperairplane.

Now you can test what you have learned so far with the quiz below.