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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
...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.
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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..
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]
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.
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.
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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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).
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 ##
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 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