Turbulent flows generated by fan array wind tunnel

The low-level atmosphere with unsteady wind and gust is a common working condition for general aviation and Micro Aerial Vehicle (MAV) flights. To better understand the aircraft flight performance within such environment, an open wind tunnel, which not only can offer space for aircraft free-flight experiments, but also can generate turbulent flow with desired characteristics, is an ideal tool to generate such environment. A Fan Array Wind Tunnel (FAWT) can easily fulfill these two requirements. In this research, an FAWT is utilized in a large indoor environment to generate certain turbulent flow profile and the flight control performance of the MAV is recorded by the motion capture system. The spectral and spatial characteristics of different turbulent income flows are obtained by a pressure transducer and an array of hotwire probes. The coherent structures of the generated turbulent flow profiles are also studied in this research.