Effect of Wind Tunnel Model Blockage on Aerodynamic Characteristics at Transonic Speeds

What is it about?

During the development of a flight vehicle, the overall aerodynamic characteristics associated with the design are obtained on a scaled model of the vehicle in wind tunnels. However, since the air flow in wind tunnels is confined within the walls of the test section, the measured data get affected by wall-interference.Hence, the size of a model in relation to that of the test section is an important parameter. It is advantageous to test a larger size model, provided corrections could be applied to alleviate the wall interference effects. In this paper, it is shown that such corrections can be found to obtain some of the aerodynamic data with reduced wall interference on typical launch vehicle type models.

Featured Image