Shaping future aircraft

Purdue University engineers have recently developed a wind tunnel that is the only one of its kind in the world capable of running quietly at “hypersonic” speeds, helping researchers to design advanced aircraft and missiles.

No other wind tunnel runs quietly while conducting experiments in airstreams travelling at Mach 6 – six times the speed of sound, said Steven Schneider, an aerospace engineer and professor in Purdue’s School of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Researchers will use the $1 million wind tunnel to help design advanced aircraft that travel at hypersonic speeds, or around 4,000 miles per hour at sea level.

Purdue engineers will present a paper about the wind tunnel tomorrow, Thursday January 12 during the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics’ Aerospace Sciences meeting and Exhibit in Reno, Nevada.

A team of Purdue engineers led by Schneider finished assembling the wind tunnel in 2001.

“After four years of debugging, recent tests have shown that it does, indeed, run quietly at Mach 6,” Schneider said. “The wind tunnel airflow has about one-tenth to one-thirtieth of the noise in other high-speed wind tunnels.”

The quiet operation is critical for recreating the smooth, or laminar, flow of air over the surfaces of aircraft, spacecraft or missiles re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere. Data from tests with models studied in the wind tunnel will lead to a better understanding of when and how the air flowing over a surface changes from smooth to turbulent. Engineers must better understand this transition from smooth to turbulent flow if they are to design improved aircraft and missiles. One aim is to design aircraft that heat up less from atmospheric friction as they re-enter the atmosphere.

“Laminar airflows can have eight times less heating than turbulent ones,” Schneider said.

Designs that heat up less would require less shielding, enabling engineers to build lighter-weight, lower-cost vehicles.

“Designers are considering a new re-entry vehicle with a metal skin,” Schneider said. “This would eliminate the tile system used on the space shuttle, which is expensive to maintain.”

Quiet wind tunnel operation requires laminar flow on the walls of a tunnel segment called the nozzle. Turbulent flow in this segment radiates noise onto the test model, interfering with experiments. Sometimes, however, turbulence does occur in the nozzle, and the researchers study the transition from laminar to turbulence to better understand how to prevent it and also to watch its effects on the model.

Researchers will use the wind tunnel to study how the transition from smooth to turbulent airflow affects the current space shuttle’s heat-resistant tiles as the spacecraft re-enters the atmosphere.

The quiet Mach 6 wind tunnel is not the first of its kind. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration previously operated a wind tunnel capable of similar performance, but that wind tunnel is not currently in operation.

The tunnel is relatively inexpensive to operate because each “run” is only about eight seconds. First, air is pumped out of a large tank that is connected to one end of the wind tunnel, creating a vacuum inside the tank. Then a valve is opened between the tank and the wind tunnel, sucking a burst of air through the wind tunnel at high velocity. The short run time requires less expensive equipment, unlike the large compressors needed for other wind tunnels that pump air continuously.

Modern computer technology and sensors have made the low-cost wind tunnel possible, Schneider said.

“Thirty years ago eight seconds of data would have been useless because you couldn’t measure anything in such a short time,” he said. “But nowadays, with all the computers and electronics and sensors, you can collect an enormous amount of data in eight seconds.”

To obtain quiet flow, the throat of the Mach 6 nozzle must be polished to a near-perfect mirror finish, eliminating roughness that will trip the flow near the wall from laminar to turbulent. Then, for the wind tunnel to remain quiet, it must be entirely free of particles as a single piece of sand could cause turbulence inside the wind tunnel, damaging the finish and ruining the quiet effect.