Today, we worked on finishing up our wind tunnels, and made some windows so we could see them. Tomorrow we will add smoke and a fan to see the air movement in the tunnel! We have some models and will be placing them in the compartment to observe the effects. No new photos from today because it was minor upgrades, but here is another photo of the tunnel:
Today, we constructed a homemade wind tunnel out of cardboard, pictured below:
the purpose of the funnel at the front is to draw in a large amount of air, then compress it so it will speed it up, and smooth the airspeed. Air is sucked in to negate turbulence, and keep the air smoothly flowing over the model.
Nothing incredibly interesting today, I viewed blueprints for our cardboard wind tunnel, will be working more on it tomorrow with pics!
Today, we sat in on a weekly checkup for a master students project. They were working on stabilizing a wing, throughout a wind tunnel and reporting their findings. The paper was unimaginably confusing, but the parts we understood were incredibly interesting. Pictured below, graphs of the groups findings (no i can not explain what they mean):
Pictured below: the set up for the experiment.
the wing is help on springs, and the ball with line creates vortices. this is intended to track how a wing pitches and heaves when exposed to turbulence.
tomorrow? water tunnel and lab tours!
Today, i worked on building an aircraft in a software used for aerodynamic testing. I then 3D printed this item, but we will have to wait until tomorrow to view the printed version. Below is a photo of the file i made. Tomorrow i will be meeting my host on zoom, and working on making this a little cleaner :). 
Today we worked with Joe to observe a wind tunnel, visited vibration labs, and acoustic rooms designed to help reduce noise in aeronautical structures. The vibration lab helped display how different materials respond to sound and other factors, such as stress and pressure.
Within the wind tunnel, we observed how it worked, through diffusers and fans and propellers. The wind tunnel was “subsonic” which means that it has a max speed of around Mach .4, and is relatively stable. NC State also has a wind tunnel of Mach ~2.3, and that is their supersonic wind tunnel, but it is incredibly loud.
