For aerospace and naval engineers developing the next generation of civilian and military vehicles, physical experiments and computational fluid dynamics (CDF) simulations are both essential to the design process.
A critical part of this is enhancing the accuracy of the computational fluid dynamics using experiments conducted in wind and water tunnels.
Virginia Tech is leading a NATO Research Task Group on Common Research Wind Tunnels for CFD Validation that involves over 60 international collaborators from nine NATO nations, including the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Canada, and Turkey. The group is tackling the issue of how to apply computational fluid dynamics to predict the flow over test models, including the details of the wind or water tunnels in which they are being tested.
This way of comparing computational fluid dynamics with physical experiments is the most direct and precise way of assessing and improving computational accuracy. The team is developing recommendations that can be used at national-scale facilities that are directly engaged in vehicle development.
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Virginia Tech’s Stability Wind Tunnel is one of four facilities chosen for the Common Research Wind Tunnel project, representing low-speed wind tunnels.
Over the course of the four-year initiative, researchers will document the precise details of these facilities in order to provide boundary conditions for the computational fluid dynamics and performing exploratory calculations to assess what details really matter.
To date, the Virginia Tech team — led by Professor William Devenport, Research Associate Professor Aurelien Borgoltz, and Research Assistant Nanya Intaratep — have conducted high-resolution optical scans and detailed flow measurements of the high-speed leg of Stability Wind Tunnel.
Undergraduates in the aerospace and ocean engineering department’s laboratory courses conducted a large portion of the flow measurements, giving practical experience in an ongoing research effort to hundreds of students.
Just past the midpoint of the project, Virginia Tech has become the “pace setter” for experimental data collection and computational fluid dynamics modeling amongst the four facilities. As the only tunnel sited at an educational institution, the Stability Wind Tunnel has an advantage in having more flexibility to schedule its tunnel. The university team has been able to complete the work at a faster pace, developing a road map for the other facilities involved.
Professor Chris Roy and Ph.D. student Adwait Hoge-Patil have been leading a team of international computer scientists from across NATO to calculate the flow in the Stability Wind Tunnel. They have developed detailed sets of computational grids that reflect the idealized form of the tunnel — termed “as designed” — and the actual form as revealed from the measured scans — “as built.” These grids have been used to establish a series of blind validation test cases, where different computational groups using a variety of computational fluid dynamics software and turbulence models attempt to compute the measured flow properties.
This NATO activity is set to continue through the end of 2026, with upcoming workshop meetings in Latvia, France, and Turkey. Work in the Stability Wind Tunnel in the coming months will focus on the characterization of the facility and the flow when aircraft and hydrofoil models are introduced.
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