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NASA Ames Research To Close Largest Windtunnels
Makarand writes "The world's largest and second largest
wind tunnels operated by the
NASA Ames Research center
will be shutdown after 60 years
and may remain shut unless major defense contracts from
the Pentagon or the private sectors are available.
The largest windtunnel will be fired up for the last time in June for four hours.
It will test the parachutes that will land the Mars exploration rovers onto the Red Planet
next year.
Fewer defense contracts and the increasing use of computer simulations are being cited as reasons
for the windtunnels to face closure."
That really blows. No, really.
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
So, maybe I can get one of the simulation jobs to replace the wind tunnels
FP!
...at $5000/hour.
What is the point of the internet?
I bet they could find a way to make a pretty cool amusement ride out of it.
This message has been ROT-13 encrypted twice for higher security.
Super computers are great for this sort of research. But I'm surprised that large wind tunnels aren't still needed. The space gained by scrapping the tunnels will be taken up again by climate controlled rooms to house expensive super computers. You'd think that there would be needs where only the largest wind tunnels would do. I guess not any more.
Yeah, I can see how people aren't happy about this. We lose something that can be used under short notice if they're mothballed. We reduce the number of jobs. However, I won't go so far as to call this bad. We aren't likely to forget the technology that goes into these systems, and we can always build them again. If they only mothball them, they might be able to be refurbished and opened again, similar to how the US Navy's Battleship fleet was brought back into service for a time. If they raze them, it won't be as easy, but it'll still be possible.
I'm just glad that the kind of world that built them isn't here. Not that widespread fear of terrorism, suspension of civil rights without public outcry, and widespread imperialism are good, but at least we're unlikely to see the kind of war that ravages an entire continent for a decade, or at least not ours.
Note: I wrote this at almost three in the morning, so if it's a bunch of crap, that's probably why.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
What am I going to use to keep my video card cool..
Can it really cost *that* much to maintain these windtunnels?
The experiments formally tested at this wind tunnel site have been moved to congress. An unnamed NASA reseacher was quoted as saying "There is just so much hot air expelled there, it seemed redudant to have a wind tunnel. In fact, we're also looking at this thus untapped resource as a possible source for energy".
NASA is also looking into tapping the "natural gas" deposits found around the nation's Taco Bells.
Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.
karma police: arrest this man, he talks in maths; he buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radio. [radiohead]
I always thought Rush Limbaugh was the world's biggest wind tunnel?
Despite the advances in super computer technology that allow the behaviour of even very complex materials to be tested in a virtual environment, a wind tunnel may still be a far cheaper and less time-consuming option, especially with one-off experiments (such as for the Mars landing parachute mentioned in the article). The wind tunnel tests the actual thing, and although it takes time to setup, a supercomputer takes a considerable amount of time, work and money to program to mimic the effects of the wind tunnel and the item being tested.
What is the point of the internet?
I don't know about aerospace, but I know that even with the fancy computer simulations a lot of motorsports teams use windtunnels to test their designs. All of the biggest Formula 1 teams have them. Not being able to test in a windtunnel was supposedly one of the reasons that Jaguar (a.k.a. Ford) sucked so bad last year, and yet they certainly have the necessary computer gear. For some reason there are improvements that can only be tested in a windtunnel.
"Where quality is like a dead stinking rat - you just can't miss it."
More and more science is relying upon computer simulations in the place of Real World testing. Simulations are only as good as the infomation available to create them. If we really knew everything we needed to know about a particular application of scientific theories, we wouldn't need to run simulations, just to verify against a rather long and complex checklist.
Can i buy one of those fans for my computer?
Maybe i could buy the wind tunnel and move in like
they did with those old missle silo's. It could be
sleeping on air every night. I guess you could be
flipping around in there unless you ate a balanced diet.
The upside is no one would hear you fart.
Because now, everyone will have to use a third-largest wind tunnel, and just dream about the days when there was a second largest wind tunnel and even a largest wind tunnel.
'nuf said.
My first job out of University was working as a computer operator at a wind tunnel.
We did lots of commerical and military stuff, and I'm really not surprised to find the F117 and a few other machines that I prolly shouldn't mention not on their list of aircraft we helped build.
For a young geek in Western New York, this was a radically cool job. When I started working there we used a bunch of IBM 1401's, at the time their largest single installation of these machines.
Later we became a DEC shop, and beta tested their PDP 11/70 series of machines.
Prolly the neatest thing - aside from the computers that is - were the models. There were a group of craftsman that would carefully, over a period of months and sometimes years, hand craft these incredibly accurate models of the various aircraft.
But they weren't just static models, being integrated with hundreds of air pressure sensors.
I worked on what was called the 'Data Reduction Team'; our machines captured, in real time, data from these sensors and later we could model the prototype aircrafts performance - should it be built that is!
Far cheaper to spend a few months in a wind tunnel testing various models then to build the real thing and have it crash.
When working we were a 24/7 shop, and although the money was good, that was the rub. The biz was largely defense driven, and after a few years I got tired of the binge and purge nature of working in defense.
But the story had a happy ending, as I landed a gig at Bell Labs and never looked at the defense industry again.
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I'd love to hear the sound of one of those wind tunnels starting up. It'd probably make a really scary, deep, mechanical beeewwwwwwwwwzzzzzzzzzmmmm kind of sound. Awesome.
Perhaps NASA could sell the old tunnels on eBay?
economical to operate such a beast, considering costs that are in the hundreds of thousands dollars per hour. The thing this windtunnel has going for it is its "full scale" character. You can test objects with a crossection of up to 12.1x24.4m^2. The_major_drawback is the maximum test speed of only 51m/s. Today, the big shots are tunnels which can do transonic speeds (up to Mach 0.9, or app. 300m/s). They are not full scale (it'd have power requirements in the order of_thousands_of megawatts). Every and each plane developpded by Airbus and Boeing is being thoroughly tested in tunnels. They are still needed, and will be for a while. Numerical methods only go so far and are mostly used in the early aerodynamical design phase. Polishing is always done in the tunnels because in order to obtain the precision needed to simulate an entire aircraft in 3D you'd probably need the power of a few hundred NEC "earth simulators" (no, I'm not kidding, that's what I do at university). By the way, the only tunnel I know of which is capable of simulating transonic flight (Reynolds numbers of 50e6 and above) is the European Transonic Windtunnel (www.etw.de).
Gone With The Wind. ........
:(
Whaaaaaaaaaaaat..... ?
Wow, these wind tunnels have a lot of uptime... They must run linux.
Yeah I know its lame but im tired, and there are wolves chasing after me.
from the header banner:
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It adds another weird element to the already surreal aspect that Ames/Moffet presents, particularly to the north. There's a number of odd (nay, sinister) looking buildings, some positively Quatermassey domes, weird towers, and of course the giant rectangular intake of the wind-tunnel building. The whole place has a cool area 51 big science of the 60s feel about it.
Combine that with the Mountain View city lot beside it, where they keep hundreds of trees and bushes in wooden boxes, ready to be transplanted, lined up in neat little rows - it looks a bit like the set of The Prisoner.
Nearby is SGI's main campus, where they've build a couple of ultra-modern office buildings (not as short of cash as we may have thought). Given that SGI's major remaining customers are NASA and NSA, it's get another little piece of the "look what government money built" zone up by Shoreline.
## W.Finlay McWalter ## http://www.mcwalter.org ##
have we really devolved so far?
we went from:
In space no one can hear you scream
to:
in this wind tunnel no one can hear you fart.
I'm surprised you didn't mention that there was also no 'lingering' problem either, just whoosh!
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
The flow path is in a vertical loop, and while the building to contain one may be 100 meters high, the throat (venturi) is no where near that diameter. Anything more than 10 meters channel size is a very dramatic exercise, and can only be run for short periods of time.
The world's largest is only 80 X 120 ft.
During the early '90s, I was stationed at Onizuka AFB which is right next to the Moffet/Ames facility. Back then, the wind tunnel had so many customers they were trying to get permission to operate the wind tunnel earlier and later than usual. Why did they need permission for the local government? This thing was LOUD. Once I was in a classroom that was right next door to the tunnel. Right in the middle of the lecture, it sounded as if a giant air conditioner was turned on. When we went outside, we figured out that it was the wind tunnel - you had to shout to be heard. The local communities (which had houses about 1.5 miles away) always complained about the noise. They didn't want it operationg before 7:30AM or after 9PM. NASA supposedly begged to get exceptions to this rule because they had "customers lined up from all over the world."
It is interesting to see now they don't have enough customers.
The US Congress is the largest wind tunnel in the USA and the UN is the largest in the world!!!
-- Many men would appreciate a woman's mind more if they could fondle it
Yeah, but the article said that the things were "hardly used". To quoteth the parent post:
wind tunnel tests the actual thing
The largest one could house a 737, which is not that large of a plane, and it can only attain a speed of 140 mph. What good is that? This is a very small subset of the "actual thing". I mean if you already went to the expense of creating a fullsize preproduction aircraft, why not throw a robot pilot, a computer and some sensors and fly the thing for real? Or throw a 1/4 size plane into a windtunnel that can test up to 700 mph?
Subsonic air flight is pretty much old hat by now. "Real" windtunnels can do things at speeds up to mach 7 or so to test the interactions of heat/pressure/speed that approach chaotic interactions and are very difficult to model or conduct a real test, and these windtunnels are at the threshold of our current technologies. This is what I would like to see from NASA. I see this as a sign of progress, not a sign of budget cuts.
My grandfather was one of the directors at mofet field when most of theses wind tunnels were being built. I know that he was one of the primary designers of the 40X80. When i was five, I got to tour the 40X80. It was awe inspiring to see the test platform, the rotors and gaze off into the darkness of the sheer scale of the tunnel from the inside.
However the Aerospace Engineering Department at Old Dominion University figured they could use the wind tunnel and started to operate it themselves and were able to both train students and make money from it.
Recently the Wind Tunnel has been used to test full scale model of a Wright Flyer that is scheduled to fly at the end of this year.
NASA may not be able to operate these facilities economically, but smaller groups that have less beauracracy and smaller aims often can. You would almost bet that some enterprising University will get a hold of the facilities and start using them.
Shrub is spending more on the military that has ever been spent. $380Billion is earmarked for Military. A further $80Billion was made available for occupying Iraq...and im sure that wont be the only two items spent on war.
The point? The military is going to be nice and flush with cash, if anyone actually *wants* to use the tunnels, they will get $$$.
I can say right now that both Boeing and Airbus Industrie have their own in-house wind tunnels that can do model testing of new airplanes. In fact, Germany's DASA--now part of the EADS group that includes Airbus Industrie--has excellent scale-model wind tunnels that were used to verify the aerodynamic design of the upcoming Airbus A380 super jumbo jet.
Between that and today's supercomputers that can do large-scale computational fluid dynamics (CFD) very accurately, small wonder why large wind tunnels are falling out of favor. A 500-600 machine setup running Linux with Beowulf clustering right now can do pretty good CFD computations--and it's cheap to build such a system, too.
The wind tunnels could be seen as a possible point of compromise by Viking invaders. Whaddya gonna do?
It goes to show that we'd rather pretend to know that something works, than know that something works. I'm a coder, and I love using computers for all sorts of tasks, but simulation is as only as good as the model you are using... how do you (in 20 years time) know that your model is accurate without a wind tunnel or actual tests to compare it with? My bet? I bet the wind tunnel simulator people will end up building wind-tunnels to comfirm their models.
meh
I guess that really blows for the 23 contractors they're laying off....
Or maybe it blows because it's not blowing...
Or maybe it's just this comment that blows.
Just think of the money they could bring in from a ride like that? Step 1: Fire up an old wind tunnel Step 2: ??? Step 3: Profit.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall
With your opinion which is of no consequence at all
It seemed odd that the father's of the cub scouts winning most often worked with the wind tunnel. I'm sure it was just a coincidence.
Right next to the big tunnel (well, the closest office building anyway) is the NAS group -- Numerical Aerodynamic Simulation. Their goal from their founding was to replace wind tunnels as much as possible with CFD (computational fluid dynamics).
It sounds like things are working out the way they were intended to. It's not that wind tunnels will completely disappear, but we'll be able to use them to cross-check portions of computational results.
And don't forget: wind tunnels can't test everything, even ones that can fit full-sized planes. So for many things computation is better than what would otherwise be possible.
i just got my aero degree yesterday (literally)- it's already reassuring to see headlines like this everyday. on a more serious note, i'm continuing to a graduate degree in CFD studies, but it is a huge mistake to get rid of too many unique resources like this. our AIAA chapter just had a guy down from Langley speaking about research in such tunnels, and while I know they are antiquated, so is most prevalent consumer aerospace technology. regardless, the experimental side of aerodynamics is important; many boundary layer methods are based on curve-fits or redundantly-proven data obtained from these experiments. computational aerodynamics gives a (relatively) cheap and widely available way to conduct "testing" which otherwise might not feasible or achievable (i.e. chemically reacting, high temp, hypersonic, unusual reynold's number, or varying composition flows), but errors do occur (approximation, method, roundoff, etc). theoretical aerodynamics gives good background, and provides understanding, a way to interpret results, and intuitive explanations for correcting problems with design. however, experimental aerodynamics are still extremely important. computer simulation and theoretical approaches can only take you so far. as an example, on our senior design project, SLA models were dontated for wind tunnel testing, in addition to validation using CMARC (computer code) and traditional analysis on paper. while the computer simulation provided the most usable information (stability derivatives, lift values), and traditional analysis came next (drag buildups on paper-the computer code was inviscid), the wind tunnel gave alot of information that could not be obtained before flight and with reliability any other way (stall patterns on the wing, neutral point determination, etc). however, the SLA model was much more expensive than the entire rest of our project. wind tunnel testing on a large scale can alleviate errors (nondimensionalization, boundary layer buildup on tunnel walls, measurement error, etc) and provide otherwise unattainable results in some cases. as a pilot and aerospace grad, i wouldn't want to test-fly a vehicle only proven in computer code and on a two-foot scale in a wind tunnel.
Add to that list the 16ft Transonic tunnel at Langley.
GET FREE APPLE STUFF!
Hire the Slashdot editors. Unlimited hot air.
What the article didn't say was that many customers are simply switching over to the heatsink fans currently needed to keep AMD Athlon Processors cool ;o)
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Now maybe I can get some sleep. Have you ever heard the howling these things make. Thankfully, they didn't run the wind tunnels nearly as often as the P-3s rattled my house.
Really. Exit 101 onto Shoreline N, then turn right on Space Park Way. Space Park Way ends at the trailer park, backed up against the NASA Ames boundary fence. The view driving down Space Park looks truly wierd, with a giant air intake, over a hundred feet high and much wider, towering over the trailer park.
If anyone ever makes "The Slums of Silicon Valley", that's the location.
I hear the great big tunneler that made the channel tunnel was sold off privately, and now it stands in some guy's back yard (?)
Also I heard of people using old aeroplane fans, pointed down, and then using the thrust to push themselves upwards, so they get an effect just like skydiving, but only a few feet off the ground. It was used for training and safety tests and such, could these be used like that? My guestimates figure you could do car-diving with wind tunnels that big!
^^^ ^^^ <- air
|||0-|-<||| <- guy
||||||||||| <- air
########### <- grille
# ------- # <- fan
# # <- air intake
----------- <- floor
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
BB, I know that graduation parties can bring a good man down, but your post is hard to read. Split it in paragraphs and capitalize, man.
I read your post because I am very much interested in the aeronautics field, but rest assured that 99% of the potential readers skipped it because of its bad formatting. That's really too bad.
That said, you are entirely right. I did a brief stunt in numerical analysis and simulation. Most standard codes work well now (gotta love FORTRAN spaghetti plates) for sub-, trans- and supersonic flight, but I am not so sure their value for hypersonic flight.
Here, the point is that this huge wind tunnel wasn't going to be very useful anymore considering its low perf. There is literally nothing it can do that cannot be done with a simulation.
Is there any situation you know of where scale effect does not prperly apply? I.e., transitions or regimes where a scale model gives you crappy data?
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Gee, I guess it's impossible for an experimentor to be able to evacuate the air in a wind tunnel until it was 1% that of sea level on Earth....Wait a minute! I've just got a great patentable idea!
Debunking the "59 Deceits"
The largest windtunnel requires something like 6 megawatts of power while in operation. NASA has their own transformer farm onsite, and they have to arrange with their host city of Santa Clara whenever they want to run it to avoid blacking out the city.
The main reason for testing in the high-reynolds, low speed regime is to make sure the damned thing takes off and lands. It doesn't matter how fast it goes in the air; it still has to take off and land in a reasonable distance. This part of flight isn't the most glamorous, but it's the bread and butter of real-flow testing.
As far as "flying the thing for real", it's very hard to get a 3-D picture of the flow around an aircraft in flight, especially if it isn't flyable yet.
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
Another sign of NASA decay ...
Rather sad though.
As the article notes, the 40x80 and the 12' were built during the war. The Ames library has a lot of interesting information in it, ranging from historical documents to books on the FFT.
The 12', also being shut down, was also an interesting beast, operating at several atmospheres in a closed circuit. Someone once calculated that the compressed air had enough stored energy to blow the entire block-sized structure a half mile into the air. It was tested fairly carefully.
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
That link is really good; I wasn't aware of an online history. There were always tales of incidents, like this one:
There's also a section on the Helium tunnel running at Mach 50, BTW.
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
I used to have a sign on my desk (when I was a hardware kind of guy, not the snivering software type I've now become) that said:
"One test is worth 1,000 expert opinions."
Translated, this means that there's nothing quite like empirical data to verify analytical results. The gathering of this empirical data is best done in a controlled environment, NOT post-production!
(I'll ignore the dumbass metric crack.)
Parachutes are very much an art, rather than a science. It is extremely hard to predict whether they will open properly, and remain deployed in a stable configuration. Basically, new models have to be tested to make sure.
It took a while to develop the parachutes for the Mars Exploration Rover. The Pathfinder & Viking 'chutes couldn't be used, and when the new ones were tested they exibited a risk of instability. The final parachute decision was made last fall.
I'm not sure why they're doing parachute tests right now. I know they had three different configurations to choose from in the fall; they may just be seeing if another configuration is safe to swap in. (Each has different engineering considerations.)
One of the two landing sites, Gusev crater, is suspected of being pretty windy. They might have been double checking that those winds would indeed be safe given the choice of parachutes; if not they still have the flexibility to switch to a less windy (and less interesting) landing site.
Look up the Pi Similarity theorem some time. With it, you can take all the relevant equations of interest (Navier-Stokes) and determine how the physical units scale with respect to interesting ratios. In other words, if you're intereted in the Reynolds number, you may find that as long as you scale a characteristic length with the inverse of viscosity, for example, the Reynolds number will remain constant. Using this technique you can study all sorts of interesting things that you could not ordinarily test directly because of size constraints, etc.
In other words, it's possible to get very useful information from flow testing a scale model, as long as you are careful to know what you're doing.
Indeed Buckinham (sp?) Pi therom is great. And simplifies things greatly. But you can't just ditch windtunnls for computers. As my fluids book pointed out. For much of fluid dynamics there is no exact solution. Only approcimations (sp?). Take Reynolds number. There is still no perfect understanding for laminar->turbulent transition. All we have is experimental data. For many computer models everything will be at the mercy of guesses and approximations. For things like this windtunnels are invaluable. Much of fluids is like this. There are so many variables and relys so much on properties of things, generlization of shapes and so forth. Until all the math and physics for fluid dynamics is solved computer models will not be able to replace windtunnels. Tunnels like the ames tunnel could use full size models. So the errors of size caused by models went away.
This is really sad it's getting shut down.
I guess the point I was trying to (poorly) make was that apparently the world doesn't need giant 120' x 80' foot windtunnels anymore, because similar results can be had with smaller windtunnels and e.g. higher mass flow raters or a different viscosity, or whatever.
At least with a wind tunnel you can't blame computer error if your billion dollar project won't fly.
I am suspicious about this. I was stationed at NAS Moffett in 1955-57, flying F2H-3 Banshee's. It is in Mt. View, and is probably the last prime real estate tract in the area, and the developers would love to have it. Think $500,000 Condo's.
The LI branch (suburbs) had one of the fastest wind tunnels on the US eastern sea board.
It was setup during the cold war for... research. It was an impressive/depressing sight. A huge compression sphere that was able to generate incredible speed into a small chamber.
Now, the sphere's been torn down and blast tubes were installed as replacements. When asked why the sphere was torn down; it was far too costly to maintain and repair, let alone operate. Plus, the blast tubes were much cheaper and was sufficient for the research being done at the University.
With advances in computer technology, it wasn't feasible to keep such an old relic operating when a less space consuming and much cheaper solution was available.
That sucks.
(The fans are downstream from the test section.)
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
You can scale by pushing the air molecules closer together. That's what the 12 foot pressure tunnel (also being shut down) did.
Cryogenic tunnels do the same thing by cooling the gas; it's a bit safer too.
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
I haven't worked there since the 80's, but at that time everything was run on PDP's, with VAXes upstream doing data reduction. It was ancient even for that time, and everything was configured on disk packs that fit into DEC's washing-machine sized hard drives.
The Standardized Wind Tunnel System (SWTS) was run in all the subsonic and transonic tunnels, and we had a contractual obligation to fix any problem within two hours (the $5000/hour cost figure was the reason for that).
The PDP's ran DEC's RSX-11M operating system, which had a file system and a FORTRAN compiler, and not much else. Processes were limited to 64k (or 32k - can't remember), and it was common to daisy-chain processes together, so that one proc would start (or "unstop") the next. If one proc failed, often due to an arithmetic error, someone would have to get in and restart the chain.
It was clunky, but with experienced people and careful documentation, it was highly reliable. However I never found my experience debugging Teledyne RMDU's to be much in demand in the job market.
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
I used to work at Ames. Walking through the really big tunnel was amazing. The huge fan blades were beautiful... not just in a geeky way, they were made of wood!!! Not an adviseable thing to do while the tunnel was on! I bet they don't close down, and this rustles up money for them. I mean, simulations are nice, but in the end you get something you want to test with real wind, and the biggest tunnel can do this in actual scale... which is important.
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