Into The Tunnel: The secret life of wind tunnels

The NASA Ames low speed open wind tunnel is a cavern: A vast 120 foot wide yawning gulf, its ceiling studded with lights, it makes humans look puny & insectile. In its centre, a rotating disc holds full size aircraft or trucks. Shadow swallows the rear as the cylcopian duct disappears into a bank of colossal fans, relentlessly grasping. Up front, a huge grid shapes and straightens the air as it builds past gale force to 115 miles per hour. Supplying this colossal energy takes 104 megawatts, a small city’s worth of power. It’s the largest wind tunnel in the world. There are lots of wind tunnels in the world, from giants like this and the S1MA transonic wind tunnel in France (powered by its own hydroelectric reservoir) to the frigid ETW tunnel in Germany that uses compressed cryogenic nitrogen, and even little lab-scale tunnels in universities scattered across the globe. They range from low speed tunnels for modelling cars and city centres, to hypersonic tunnels that can recreate the ae ... Read full article.