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Wind Tunnel

All articles tagged with #wind tunnel

technology15 days ago•5 min saved

SAFS: NASA’s Polarized Light Camera Makes Airflow Visible Like Never Before

NASA Langley’s Self-Aligned Focusing Schlieren (SAFS) imaging uses light polarization to visualize airflows in wind tunnels, simplifying beyond traditional dual-grid schlieren setups. Since its 2020 debut, SAFS offers faster, cheaper, on-site flow visualization, captures complex shock structures around boosters, and is now used by 50+ institutions in 8+ countries, earning the 2025 R&D 100 Award and NASA’s Government Invention of the Year.

via NASA (.gov)|

#aerospace #nasa #safs

science5 months ago•7 min saved

Wind-Powered Tumbleweed Rovers Promise Cost-Effective Mars Exploration

Researchers have validated through wind tunnel tests that tumbleweed-inspired rovers could operate on Mars, propelled by the planet's high winds, potentially covering vast distances and collecting environmental data, offering a low-cost and wide-reaching method for planetary exploration.

via Space|

#exploration #mars #rovers

science-and-technology7 months ago•2 min saved

X-59 Supersonic Aircraft Undergoes Testing in Japan

NASA and JAXA tested a scale model of the X-59 aircraft in a Japanese wind tunnel to assess noise levels and validate predictions for quieter supersonic flight, a key step toward developing commercial quiet supersonic airliners.

via NASA (.gov)|

#jaxa #nasa #science-and-technology

science2 years ago•2 min saved

Study Challenges Long-Held Principles on Turbulent Flows in New Findings

Experiments conducted at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization (MPI-DS) in Göttingen reveal that the scaling laws formulated over 80 years ago, which explain turbulent flows, are only partially accurate. The study shows that these laws, established by mathematician Andrei Kolmogorov in 1941, apply only to strongly idealized flows and do not fully explain real-world turbulence. The researchers used a unique wind tunnel to generate high degrees of turbulence and found systematic deviations from Kolmogorov's predictions, suggesting that medium-sized eddies are not completely decoupled from larger eddies in a system. The findings have implications for understanding turbulence in engineered flows and climate models.

via Phys.org|

#empirical-data #research-facility #scaling-laws