This first part of the course Introduction to Aerospace Engineering presents an overall picture of the aeronautics domain. This overview involves a number of different perspectives on the aerospace domain, and shows some basic principles of the most important concepts for flight. Then the basic aerodynamics are covered, followed by flight mechanics.

During the OCW Global 2013 conference Introduction to Aerospace Engineering I was awarded with the Award for OpenCourseWare Excellence in the category of best multimedia course.

  • Have an overview of the history of flight
  • Apply basic/constitutive principles of mechanics of fluids – a.o. Bernoulli.
  • Apply control volume approaches
  • Explain flow regimes (viscous/non-viscous; compressible/incompressible aerodynamics) and to estimate viscous and thermal effects
  • Compute lift/drag of simple configurations
  • Describe reference frames and derive general equations of motion for flight and orbital mechanics
  • Apply equations of motion to determine aircraft performance in steady gliding, horizontal and climbing flight
  • Derive aircraft performance diagram and flight envelope, in relation to aircraft morphology, lift-drag polar and engine performance
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Introduction to Aerospace Engineering I by TU Delft OpenCourseWare is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://ocw.tudelft.nl/courses/introduction-aerospace-engineering/.
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