Low Speed Wind Tunnel Testing

✍ Scribed by J. B. Barlow, W. H. Rae, Jr, A. Pope

• Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
• Year: 1999
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 724
• Edition: 3
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

The practice of low-speed experimental aerodynamics has continued to evolve and
continues to be a cornerstone in the development for a wide range of vehicles
and other devices that must perform their functions in the face of forces imposed
by strong flows of air or water. In the 1970s and continuing into the early 1980s a
sizable group of experts predicted that the need for aerodynamic experiments,
particularly in the subsonic regime, would rapidly disappear as computational fluid
dynamics would in a rather short time become sufficiently capable so that all
needed information would be available from computational simulations at a costeffectiveness
superior to that of experiments. It is true that computational capability
has continued to improve at a substantial pace, but it has not come close to reaching
a level sufficient to replace the need for experimental data in development projects.
There are now no credible predictions that computational simulation will replace
the need for all data from physical experiments in any significant development
projects. Turbulence continues to confound us in many respects.

✦ Table of Contents

1 Introduction
2 Wind Tunnels
3 Wind Tunnel Design
4 Pressure, Flow, and Shear Stress Measurements
5 Flow Visualization
6 Calibration of the Test Section
7 Forces and Moments from Balance Measurements
8 Use of Wind Tunnel Data: Scale Effects
9 Boundary Corrections I: Basics and Two-Dimensional Cases
10 Boundary Corrections 11: Three-Dimensional Flow
11 Boundary Corrections III: Additional Applications
12 Additional Considerations for Aerodynamic Experiments
13 Aircraft and Aircraft Components
14 Ground Vehicles
15 Marine Vehicles
16 Wind Engineering
17 Small Wind lhnnels
18 Dynamic Tests
Appendix 1 Subsonic Aerodynamic Testing Association (SATA)
Appendix 2 Numerical Constants and Unit Conversions