Turbulence in the fast lane.

• Position: Hypersonic Aircraft

Although NASA's X-43A and other hypersonic airplanes uses air-breathing engines and fly much like 747s, there is a big difference between ripping air at Mach 10 (around 7,000 mph) and cruising through it at 350 mph. These differences are even more pronounced when hypersonic aircraft sip rarified air at 100,000 feet, while commercial airliners gulp the much thicker stuff at 30,000.

Aerothermodynamic heating is a very big deal at Mach 10. The critical point comes where air changes from flowing smoothly across a surface (laminar flow) to when it becomes chaotic (turbulent flow). Aerothermodynamic heating largely determines the engine size, weight, choice of materials, and overall size in hypersonic aircraft. So, engineers would like to have a much better understanding of what triggers turbulence and how they can control it.

Air goes from laminar to turbulent at what engineers call the "boundary layer." They understand how this happens at slower speeds, but they still are grappling with which factors influence it at hypersonic speeds. Anatoli Tumin, associate professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering at the University of Arizona, Tucson, is among those studying the problem. He has developed a model that predicts the surface roughness effects on the transition from laminar to...