Shark Skin Riblets — Turbulent Drag Reduction

Shark skin isn't smooth — it's covered in tooth-like denticles ribbed with microscopic longitudinal grooves. This simulator renders a split test plate, smooth on the left and riblet-textured on the right, with a real turbulent-boundary-layer model (Schlichting's flat-plate friction correlation) driving both the visuals and the numbers. Tune the riblet spacing and height, and the flow speed and reference length, and watch the friction velocity, the riblet spacing in dimensionless wall units s⁺, and the resulting skin-friction drag change and wall shear stress respond live — including the real physics that riblets stop helping and start hurting once they grow too large relative to the near-wall turbulence.