Posted by ohjeez 3 days ago
I worked there as a work-study student. Part of the job was wiping down the tunnel chamber after their test runs. The smoke you see used in wind tunnel videos is not actually smoke, but a white oil. And for a FWS job the pay wasn't bad, had to put on a bunny suit and crawl around tight spaces, LOL.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Tech_Stability_Wind_T...
Magnetically levitating the model in the tunnel and measuring the forces by measuring how the magnets need to be driven to keep the model in place is pretty cool.
https://spaceflightnow.com/2020/02/28/boeing-says-thorough-t...
> Both errors could have been caught before launch if Boeing had performed more thorough software testing on the ground, according to John Mulholland, vice president and manager of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner program.
> Mulholland said Boeing engineers performed testing of Starliner’s software in chunks, with each test focused on a specific segment of the mission. Boeing did not perform an end-to-end test of the entire software suite, and in some cases used stand-ins, or emulators, for flight computers.
Cheaping out cost billions and nearly two astronauts.
Things that are tested/validated in wind tunnels nowadays: effect of different paint and coatings, engine inlet flow, noise, tunned mass dampers, effect of placement of sensors, control surface flutter.
This is a reminder that nobody starts at the top. They usually start by copying a lot of what those at the top do, as a shortcut to getting there.
