A NEW LARGE WIND-TUNNEL FOR CIVIL-ENVIRONMENTAL AND AERONAUTICAL APPLICATIONS

A non-conventional wind tunnel for low-speed applications in both Aero nautical and Wind Engineering fields has been designed at Politecnico di Milano, as a joint research of the Mechanical and the Aerospace Dep artments. Peculiarity of the facility is the contemporary presence of two test sections having very different performances, the first one ch aracterised by higher speed and low turbulence, the second allowing gr ound boundary layer simulations at lower speed and wider test section size. Very strict size constraints of the building in which the wind t unnel must fit made the fulfilment of the general specifications a dif ficult task and led to the adoption of nonconventional solutions in th e wind tunnel layout and specific components design. The paper present s the design criteria that supported the choice of the original soluti on and discusses the feasibility of the plant on the basis of experime ntal analysis on a 1 : 9 scale model. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. A ll rights reserved.