Design and Performance Test of an Indigenously Fabricated Sub-sonic Wind Tunnel

Design of Sub-sonic Wind Tunnel

Abstract

The study of the interaction between wind flow and the surface is crucial to many applications including industry, automotive and most importantly aerospace. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) has come a long way in the last couple of decades but still experimental validations of its results are required. Therefore, development of a small-scale low-cost subsonic wind tunnel is proposed in this project, with the aim that the final product can be used as a laboratory equipment and for further research and design projects. In the proposed project, a low-cost easy to manufacture subsonic wind tunnel is designed and fabricated. A study of various designs of wind tunnels including both open loop and closed loop wind tunnels is performed. The size of the proposed wind tunnel would be determined such that it can be easily accommodated in our laboratory. The calculations based on these constraints is carried out using the  requirement of flow match number and the governing equations such as the continuity equation and Bernoulli's equation. An additional component can be added using CFD to analyze and validate the flow regime in the test section based on the design.