to create a 12-meter yacht had been win
back the America's Cup winning States
was an achievement realized by skipper
Dennis Conner his winning team and the
boat Stars and Stripes on February 4th
1987 many enthusiasts felt that the loss
of the America's Cup warriors earlier to
the Australians was due to a failure to
keep up with the latest technology
in an effort to ensure that the
Americans had the faster vote in the
final rounds at this year's competition
many changes were made the design team
led by John Marshall elected to make use
of an drag reduction technology called
riblets developed by NASA's Langley
Research Center and manufactured by the
Priyanka these sheets of pin vinyl
plastic placed on the underside of stars
and stripes are actually microscopic
scratchers perfect triangular each
running the entire length of the button
John Marshall explains the boat itself
looks a little bit like the Space
Shuttle in the sense that the surface is
paved would be separate plaques of
Riblet material rather than having a
meticulously smooth surface this is an
intentionally rough surface and it is
the microscopic roughness that makes it
work and that leads to testable drag
reductions in a variety of different
research by placing a small section of
the 3m Riblet film under a high-powered
microscope it's easy to see the riblets
and their near-perfect triangular groove
the idea for rivets came out of research
to modify airplane
with less resistance same researchers
also found that some sharks have Riblet
like skin that allows them to glide
effortlessly through the water
reporting Langley's Ben animals we noted
from some Russian literature that
certain sharks have a structure or skin
structure very similar to a Riblet
structure you look at these things under
microscope there are tiny be shaped
grooves aligned with the flow of the
right scale according to our Windtunnel
experiments to reduce drag only the fast
sharks have these the slow sharks do not
it was engineer Mike Walsh who
originated research on riblets at
langley the microscopic v grooves were
first studied on machined aluminum
plates in this low speed wind zone 3m
then developed a way to put riblets on
vinyl test samples of the Riblet film
have been flown by Boeing aircraft
company and aboard a NASA Learjet to
confirm its efficiency according to Ben
Enders the reduction of skin friction by
rivets is on the order of 6 to 8%
luckily in proceedings for the airline
industry in the estimate that comes
savings for the US commercial airline
fleet at roughly 300 million dollars per
year since it's lighter than paint 3m is
also looking at the riddle of material
as a protective coating for our plant
because the technology is new there are
still many unanswered questions but
scientists feel that riblets can be used
in a postive applications the natural
gas pipelines the submarines and
racecars nasa's Riblet technology a
high-tech solution that helps keep
America
and a