Design Construction and Performance Test of a Short Length Subsonic Wind Tunnel

Abstract

Wind engineering is a field that has been evolving over centuries. Wind engineering is based on using measurements of actual wind flows to predict the forces transferred to engineering structures and machines. A large portion of wind engineering today depends directly or indirectly on wind tunnels. Wind tunnel is a device, by artificially producing airflow relative to a stationary body that measures aerodynamic force and pressure distribution to simulate with actual conditions. Wind Tunnels offer a rapid, economical, and accurate means for aerodynamic research. The most important aspect of wind tunnels is their ability to accurate recreate the full complexity of full fluid flow. Aerodynamicists use wind tunnels to test models of proposed aircraft since the flow conditions can be carefully controlled in the tunnel which affect the forces on the aircraft. In the current project a short length subsonic wind tunnel is designed, constructed and its performance is tested. A 20 kW motor with 10 blades of diameter 1.20 m is used a fan to facilitate the air flow. The cross section of the wind tunnel is of square type with dimension 0.90 m × 0.90 m and the length of the section is 1.35 in. The overall length of the tunnel is about 7.35 m which can be erected in a laboratory room. After testing the performance of the tunnel it is found that the maximum wind velocity inside the wind tunnel is 26.62 m/s and the velocity profile along the height and width of the test section is almost linear in nature excluding the 11.11% allowance in four sides. The constructed wind tunnel has conformed to the design and can be used for different test in the field of aerodynamics.