Wind Tunnel Research at a Community College

In summary, a group of engineering and science students at a community college have been gifted a wind tunnel by a local university. They have free reign to refurbish and tune it, and have come up with ideas such as testing paper airplane designs, drag of car bodies, airfoil design, resonance frequency failures, and chemistry reactions at different wind speeds. They are looking for ideas to impress on their resumes, such as publishing a paper on tuning or paper airplane designs. One suggestion is to build a streamline generator if the wind tunnel does not already have one.
  • #1
SphericalCow
21
3
I'm a student at a community college that was gifted a wind tunnel by a local uni. I'm leading a group of 5+ engineering / science students to refurbish and tune it.

The testing chamber is around 12 x 5 x 5 inches, and we have free reign to do anything we'd like. We've had some ideas like testing different aspects of paper airplane design, drag of car bodies, designing air foils, resonance frequency failures, chemistry reactions at different wind speeds, etc. Most of us have a year before we transfer.

Q1) Do you have any ideas for experiments a group of engineers and science majors would love?However, we'd also like to be able to put something impressive down for our applications to internships / REUs / grad school.

Q2) What can we do with this that will look awesome on a resume? For example, could we publish a paper on tuning it, or paper airplane designs?

Additional comments / thoughts are welcome. Thank you!
 
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  • #2
I would not try and impress. That said, the refurbishment is probably more "impressive" than whatever you stick in there.
 
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Likes berkeman and russ_watters
  • #3
Does it already have a streamline generator? If not, it could be an interesting project to build one and optimize it.

1688566432549.png

https://www.cartagena99.com/recursos/alumnos/temarios/AER_T2p1-InviscidFlow_(English).pdf
 

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