Adapting a Blowdown Type Wind Tunnel for Ground Effect Simulation Tests

Abstract: In the paper are shortly presented the main results of some researches performed by the author regarding the adapting of an intermittent (blowdown type) wind tunnel for testing models of terrestrial (road transportation) vehicles, (air) vehicles with ground effect, or which evolve in the ground proximity (the cases of aircraft take-off running and lift-off), as well as for aircraft half models testing (the so called “reflection-plane testing”). This new obtained installation includes a large series of automatic systems (mechanical, measuring and driving), which must accomplish all the envisaged testing requirements. The essential advantage of this kind of solution, with respect to that of a continuous closed (usually nonpressurized) wind tunnel adapting, consists in obtaining much larger values of the test Reynolds number, given by the correspondingly higher values of the stagnation pressure (in the blowdown wind tunnel settling chamber). So far, as we know, nowhere in the world has been considered the problem of adapting a pressurized intermittent type wind tunnel to aerodynamic tests with correct ground effect simulation. The main part of this adaptation is the moving belt mechanical system (considered to be installed at the floor of the modified wind tunnel three-dimensional transonic test section), whose task is to assure the elimination of the velocity nonuniformity effect, introduced by the boundary layer on the respective wall of the wind tunnel, without any irreversible alteration of the geometry and kinematics of the installation above.

Brief Biography of the Speaker:
Senior researcher Richard Selescu graduated as an engineer from the Polytechnic Institute Bucharest, the Faculty of Mechanics, Department of Aircraft Engineering in 1970. He is working in the National Institute for Aerospace Research “Elie Carafoli’’ – INCAS, Department of Aerodynamics, at the Trisonic Wind Tunnel Laboratory. He received his PhD degree in Aerodynamics and Fluid Mechanics at the Aerospace Engineering Faculty of the “Politehnica” University Bucharest in 1999. Among the research fields of interest, he approached the analytic modeling in aerodynamics, fluid mechanics and magnetofluid dynamics. Thus, he introduced the following nomenclature: the isentropic surfaces and a 2-D velocity quasi-potential function on these surfaces (in fluid mechanics); a new physical quantity - the MHD vector and its vector lines (in magnetofluid dynamics); the tronconical flow (in the supersonic aerogasdynamics); the similarity depth for satisfying the gas-hydrodynamic analogy (in the supercritical hydrodynamics).