Transonic Wind Tunnels

The 6" x 22" Transonic wind tunnel is a blow down (intermittent) wind tunnel designed specifically to test airfoils, carefully designed to provide a low turbulence test section so that laminar flow transonic airfoils may be examined. The wind tunnel operates from Mach number of 0.2 to 1.1 and obtains Reynolds numbers from 5 to 25 million, and has been used for airfoil studies for companies and government agencies including Bell Helicopters, Kaman, Ames, NASA and others. The facility's high quality of flow and productivity has been recognized by the aerospace community; NASA, USAF, and USN, along with many aircraft corporations Beech, Boeing, Lockheed, and Learjet, have employed this unique wind tunnel for testing. Bell Helicopters and Sikorsky Helicopters have rotors that use airfoils developed with the assistance of this wind tunnel.

Because of the tunnel's accessibility and new computational methods, the new generation of laminar flow, high speed airfoils was designed and tested at Ohio State and is now flying on the Italian Avanti Twin Pusher turboprop business aircraft. In addition, an entire series of airfoils was developed at AARL for a new five-blade propeller to be used on the Avanti. The airfoils were designed and tested for flight at M=0.67. Upon confirmation of performance, the airfoil family was given to Hartzell Propeller Inc., who is now producing the propeller for Avanti. Another example of propeller airfoil development is the Hamilton Standard HS-1 series of airfoils, which were designed by Hamilton Standard engineers and evaluated in the 6"x22" wind tunnel. These airfoils are now on the advanced eight-blade advanced propeller marketed by Hamilton Standard.

A small 6"x3" wind tunnel is available for experiments on mixing and heat transfer problems in the high subsonic speed range, driven by heated air up to 400^oF. Speed can be adjusted for Mach number of 0.4 to 0.9. The wind tunnel was used to perform experiments for the NASA/GE Propulsion 21 program.