Analysis Applications: Wind Tunnel Studies

The Aerosciences Evaluation and Test Capabilities (AETC) project’s Evaluation of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) as Surrogate for High-Speed Wind Tunnel Testing is a project that NASA developed to determine if current state-of-the-art CFD tools are sufficiently capable of predicting high speed aerodynamic flows in order to replace experimental data obtained from NASA’s current high-speed Unitary Plan Wind Tunnel (UPWT) facilities at Langley.  The evaluation metric will include the quality of the CFD data as well as the cost of generating the CFD data as compared to the quality and cost of the measured data obtained from NASA’s existing UPWT high speed wind tunnel facility. The effort in our organization supports the generation of the wind tunnel facility computer aided design (CAD) for use in all CFD tools being used across the project and performing Overflow CFD to be use as one of the tools to compare to the measured wind tunnel data.  We will also provide wind tunnel CFD support for the development of measurement apparatus such as the rake probe design.