Wind Tunnel Experiments
Wind Tunnel V1
The first wind tunnel I designed and made back in the summer of 2025.
Various upgrades have been made to the tunnel such as adding side rails to better fix the acrylic boards in place and redesigning and improving the mesh geometry based on reynolds number estimations.
However, due to the inherent nature of the tunnel, only so much could be done, so I made a V2.
F1 model
Testing an F1 car inside the wind tunnel. You can get a general sense of the airflow going over the car, how the front and rear wings force the air up around them, the general downwashing shape of the sidepods, and the way the car "punches a hole" in the air, causing the wake behind it.
F1 model
Here you can see the wake of the car quite well, the turbulent aircoming out of the rear wheel wake joins with the faster diffuser air to create interesting vortex-esque patterns, although full vorticies are not able to form because of the airspeed.
3D printed Airfoil
Running the 3D printed Airfoil in the wind tunnel, here you can see I adjusted the angle of attack, and there are some obvious flow separations.
3D printed Airfoil
A close-up shot of the wind tunnel shows a vortex forming off the trailing edge of the lower wing, where faster airflow on the bottom rolls over the wing, giving it some sideways momentum and causing it to form a spiral.
Wind Tunnel V2
Due to the inherent inaccuracies of the first wind tunnel, I set out to redesign a better, more realistic version that would still fit on the desktop.
It features a contraction cone and diffuser now, while I further improved on the flow straighteners inside the tunnel to give the results below.
F1 Car in V2
Although the smoke is fainter, in the second version of the tunnel, due to better designing and printing techniques airflow is much more laminar.
3D printed Airfoil in V2
Running a 3D printed Airfoil in the wind tunnel V2. A close-up video recorded through a webcam.
