10 x 5 Wind Tunnel

10 x 5 Wind Tunnel - Photo Credit: Dave Guttridge

The wind tunnel is capable of laser-based experiments. Photo: Thomas Angus

Fans

The 10 x 5 Fans

City scape

City-scape

Monitoring

Monitoring

The team

The team

The 10x5 wind tunnel is one of a series of wind tunnels available in the Department. Wind tunnels within the Deparmtent cover speeds from a few metres per second to Mach 9. There are 5 general purpose low-speed tunnels with working sections from 0.4 to 16 square metres.

The refurbished 10x5 Wind Tunnel is a highly reconfigurable temperature-controlled facility with two test sections offering a wide range of features covering just about any study involving airflow. It provides an excellent facility for aerodynamic development and safety evaluation studies of everything from road and race cars to aircraft, buildings and structures.

This tunnel has two large test sections and the lower section is fitted with a moving floor. The lower test section is a full 20m long (one of the longest test sections in Europe) and a 3m x 1.5m cross-sectional area. It is equipped with a rolling road, traverse and full boundary layer control. The upper test section is in effect a large wind testing arena 18m in length and a massive 5.7m x 2.8m cross-sectional area. Both test sections are outfitted with an intelligent fully computerised control system and tunnel local area network for the distribution of data. Brand new National Instruments hardware and state-of-the-art LabVIEW based data-processing software enable the user to make maximum use of the facility.

The lower section continues the tradition of the previous tunnel with very high-quality flow and the facility is complemented by a comprehensive range of instrumentation which enable measurements of force, pressure and flow velocity to be made accurately and efficiently.

As well as offering an all-round aerodynamic testing solution, the lower test section is highly optimized for race car testing. Capable of speeds of up to 40m/s, it has an automated support strut and integral 6-component force balance. This greatly simplifies the testing of road vehicles. The rolling road can be yawed to simulate the effects of crosswind and the tunnel uses a novel high-precision wheel drag cell system supplied by Flow Dynamics. A smaller 4.5 x 4 working section tunnel is also available when large scale testing is not required.

The 10x5 wind tunnel is also fitted with equipment to simulate the atmospheric Boundary Layer for wind engineering of buildings and other structures (1:200 scale and upwards).

Wind shear and turbulence of the atmospheric environment can be simulated in this for studies of pollution and the wind loading of buildings and structures. The tunnel has a sophisticated 3-axis probe traversing mechanism, non-intrusive particle image velocimetry (PIV) equipment and the control and data processing are fully computerised.

This facility is part of the National Wind Tunnel Facility.