How to test aerodynamics at home ?
How to test aerodynamics at home ?
Aerodynamics is the study of flow of air over an object and its associated different flow characteristics. Aerodynamics create lift and drag. We can study the flow of air over any surface like a sphere, a ball, car and aircrafts. Study of aerodynamics helps us to understand the different types of forces created and its effect on objects.
In order to study aerodynamics, in industry or for commercial purposes wind tunnels are used. There are huge wind tunnels which are generally used for testing aerodynamics of objects for a speed flow between low subsonic to hypersonic. For all these purposes different types of wind tunnel are used. However all these wind tunnels are very costly and take a huge amount of time to manufacture or build.
We can also take simple techniques in order to make or replicate the wind tunnel. These types of techniques are not as accurate as the wind tunnel testing but can give a fair result from which we can deduce our hypothesis and correlate our speculation. Some of these techniques are like using fan and wool tufts, using water and ink, small replicas of a wind tunnel, using smoke and others. We can also use the softwares in order to simulate the aerodynamic behaviors.
Using fan and wool tufts can give us a fair amount of idea about the direction and behavior of air flow over the object. We can also simulate by using water and dyes or using ink in order to get similar behavior. With the use of fan and smoke we will also have a fair idea about the behavior of flow over any object.
Nowadays with the advancement of computation technologies we have many softwares which can do our simulation faster and more accurately then the wind tunnel test and at a lower cost. Computational fluid dynamics is the field which is used now in industry as well as we can also use it in our home through the use of computers. The results of CFD are more accurate and can simulate real world scenarios. It has highly reduced the cost as well as time which is otherwise generally taken by wind tunnel testing.
