Fluid Flow Cloak For Effective Sailing

#-Link-Snipped-# researchers have proved a  theoretical ability which increases the efficiency of ships in a statistically significant way, by deceiving the surrounding water into staying still. Yaroslav Urzhumov, assistant research professor in electrical and computer engineering at Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering said, “Ships expend a great deal of energy pushing the water around them out of the way as they move forward. What our cloak accomplishes is that it reduces the mass of fluid that has to be displaced to a bare minimum. We accomplish this by tricking the water into being perfectly still everywhere outside the cloak. Since the water is still, there is no shear force, and you don't have to drag anything extra with your object. So, comparing a regular vessel and a cloak of the same size, the latter needs to push a much smaller volume of water, and that's where the hypothesized energy efficiency comes from.”

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Row, row, row your boat!

Taking into consideration that ships spend a great deal of energy pushing the water around them out of the way as they move forward, this theory has been postulated. “When you try to drag an object on a fishing line through water, it feels much heavier than the object itself, right?” he said. “That's because you are dragging an additional volume of water with it.What our cloak accomplishes is that it reduces the mass of fluid that has to be displaced to a bare minimum."

While the cloak asserted by Urzhumov is different from other cloaks designed to make objects seem invisible to light and sound, it adopts the same basic principles, usage of a man-made material that can modify the normal forces of nature in novel ways. In Urzhumov’s fluid-flow cloak, he fancies the frame of a vessel covered with porous materials, similar to a rigid sponge-like material, that would be penetrated with holes and passages. Strategically placed in this material would be tiny pumps, which would have the ability to push the flowing water along at various forces. Urzhumov said, “The goal is make it so the water passing through the porous material leaves the cloak at the same speed as the water surrounding by the vessel. In this way, the water outside the hull would appear to be still relative to the vessel, thereby greatly reducing the amount of energy needed by the vessel to push vast quantities of water out of the way as it progresses.” Urzhumov plans to develop many more prototypes based on this cloak's principle.

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