Design, Fabrication and Testing of Smoke Wind Tunnel

Flow visualization is the direct observation of fluid flow. Moving fluids form complex patterns and understanding and visualizing those patterns is an important aspect in aerospace industry. The previously existing research and results were taken into consideration for design parameters and calculation for dimensions of various parts of the wind tunnel. Design calculations allow wind velocities in the range of 1-3 m/s at the test section. The design includes a rectangular test section of 0.06m x 0.30m cross-section for accommodation of test object of width 0.06m. The design was made in SolidWorks and was fabricated with basic materials like plywood and acrylic sheets. PC cabinet fans were used for flow circulation. Liquid wax is utilized for the purpose of smoke generation and rubber and PVC pipes were utilized for smoke containment and delivery system. Profiles that were used for testing included cylinder, sphere, cuboid, NACA airfoils and flat plate.

Low Speed Wind Tunnel Design and Optimization Using Computational Techniques and Experimental Validation

Generally, the experimental aerodynamics is related to wind tunnel experiments. The wind tunnel design topic is very old but the development in computational fluid dynamics led to improvement in the wind tunnel design. This paper describes the design and optimization of low speed wind tunnel using CFD techniques. The new optimum wind tunnel will replace the old one featuring poor air quality and small area with lower wind speed at the test section. A computational domain was generated and adopted using ANSYS mesh generator and the solution domain was analysed by simulation technique using FLUENT CFD code in ANSYS Workbench package. The pressure drop calculations comparison between analytical, computational and experimental is included for different sections in the wind tunnel. The contraction cone was optimized using the response surface technique. The results identified that the pressure drop and turbulence level are modified as compared to the old wind tunnel.

Modification of Prandtl Wind Tunnel

Wind tunnels are devices that enable researchers to study the flow over objects of interest, the forces acting on them and their interaction with the flow, which is nowadays playing an increasingly important role due to noise pollution. Since the first closed circuit wind tunnel with variable cross-section was built in G¨ottingen, its Prandtl configuration has little change. The wind tunnel with Prandtl configuration has four corners and vanes, more than 50% of the total pressure loss are caused by the corners and vanes. How to reduce the total pressure loss is a world class problem in the wind tunnel design. This study attempts to propose a novel configuration of wind tunnel, where the corners have been replaced by semi-circular tunnel. Sun wind tunnel 2 has only two corners and vanes, while Sun wind tunnel 1 has no  corners and vanes at all. It is expected the new wind tunnel can reduce the total pressure loss from 50% to 10%.