HIGH EFFICIENCY NASA WIND TUNNEL

Last crawled date: 1 year, 10 months ago

NASA TRANSONIC WIND TUNNEL DESIGN.
DESIGNED BY JC BIGGS

The overall goal of this design is to accomplish interchangeability with simple current existing technologies and ground equipment to keep cost low. All mechanics can be motor or hydraulic driven. The rail based interchange track allows movement away from the tunnel for new designs to be loaded onto the trolleys, or more trolleys added. The nature of the rail system gives you a substantial amount of space to load many test chamber designs.

I also wanted to take into account efficiency of the air flow. to my knowledge no one has built a wind tunnel that takes advantage of Bernoulli/Coanda Effects and inducement and entrainment, (I could be wrong on this, I didn't do much research) while this technology is well known in other industries that require mass air movement. (Dyson bladeless fan for instance uses 20cfm to move 300) In addition to the Coanda effect, placing the tunnel in a air wind region assist with further decreasing the energy required for further accelerations. With fan staging, my thought process is that you could increase static pressure to the point that you don't need as much power input to the fans to achieve the desired velocities in the test chamber, while minimizing the impact of prevailing wind variability.

I also believe that having 2 interchangeable chambers in series, better allows the engineers to optimize flow dynamics, Chamber design, and pre/post test subject conditions. This should lead to overall more accurate results with less testing required. The design also allows for "transitional" designs. For instance, if you want to move from a Cylindrical chamber to a rectangular one. You now have the ability to transition that flow profile as required.

Finally I wanted the chamber to be open air. Avoiding needs for post test cooling, and the associated boundary drag with pushing air around a loop. While adding the ability to do things like live engine testing, or Non-contained Model testing (ie, the tunnel blowing onto a model, but the model situated outside the end of the chamber in open air,) or adding water injection to simulate Mach 1 Rain performance. You could also inject debris for Dust testing,

Data aquisition and model fixturing will be built into the trolley system. For standard Test Module Designs, this would be a permanent mounting fixture protruding through the "tube"

Thanks for the opportunity. This was fun thing to model.