Drag measurements were made on a blunt-based body of revolution with the addition of several alternative boat-tailed afterbodies. The best of these afterbodies, with a length of only 60 per cent of the maximum diameter, gave almost as much reduction of drag as a conventional streamline tail. The pressure distribution on this body was measured for various lengths. It does not seem to be possible at present to predict quantitatively the drag of this type of body but some qualitative design principles have been suggested.

This paper presents a method with strong convergence characteristics for the determination of eigenvalues and eigenvectors of continuous systems. The limitation on the number of undetermined constants in the displacement functions introduced by the conditions at the ends of a segment is removed by the introduction of points of freedom within the segment.

This improves the convergence of eigenvalues and eigenvectors very rapidly with the number of segments, especially in torsional vibration problems where the convergence with the usual Matrix Displacement method is very poor. The continuous medium is successively approximated by the use of sub-systems with finite numbers of degrees of freedom. The principles upon which the method is based and the convergence of the results are discussed and illustrated by a series of examples.

This paper deals with the effects of a superimposed radial outflow upon the motion of the fluid between a rotating and a stationary plane disc. This is an idealisation of the situation found in advanced turbo-machinery in which cooling of the rotor faces is necessary. The boundary layer approximations to the equations of fluid motion are integrated by an extension of the numerical technique proposed in Ref. 11. Predictions of drag torque and radial pressure distributions are compared with experimental results from a 30 in (762 mm) diameter system, using a range of speeds up to 4000 rev/min, while varying the axial spacing and rate of imposed radial flow. Qualitative agreement was satisfactory throughout the range, but quantitative discrepancies in the estimates of drag and in the pressure distributions at certain flow conditions suggest that the simple mixing length hypothesis used in this analysis for the turbulent shear terms in the equations of motion is not universally adequate.

Experiments in a in (6-35 mm) channel have yielded further information on the precision and convenience of the razor blade technique. It is shown that adhesive tape or carefully located cement can be used to secure a segment of razor blade over a static pressure hole: the resulting calibration for shear stress remains valid if the blade is removed and relocated over the same or a different, similar sized hole. Razor blade segments, calibrated in this manner, have been used to measure wall-shear stress in a turbulent boundary layer with tangential, secondary injection: the results indicate that V. C. Patel’s law of the wall is valid for such flows.

A theoretical study is made of the problem of a long, thick cylindrical tube subjected to two equal and diametrically opposite normal loads. The stress state is analysed by the three-dimensional theory of elasticity, with the Papkovich and Neuber stress-function approach. Numerical results for stresses and radial displacement are obtained to show the nature of stress concentration in the neighbourhood of the load. Some related experiments using the photoelasticity technique are also accomplished. Favourable correlation is shown between the theory and the test results.

The supersonic flow past an elliptic cone of small eccentricity is treated as a pertubation of the axially-symmetric conical flow. The perturbation is singular; a uniformly valid solution is constructed by formulating the problem in sphero-conal coordinates (in which the cone surface is always a level surface of one of the coordinates) and by using the method of matched asymptotic expansions. This formulation enables first-order results to be obtained economically. In a numerical example for the flow past a cone of quite large eccentricity at incidence, it is shown that the present first-order solution (of three terms) agrees as well with experiment as a ten-term approximation obtained by Martellucci using the method of linearised characteristics.