A new paper is available from the 2024 VFS Forum 80 Conference that discusses recent work on understanding how the size or scale (Reynolds number) of a rotor affects performance via direct measurement in the compressed air wind tunnel. You can find more info here and download the paper here: [PDF]
Growing Impact Podcast on Floating Offshore Wind
Dr. Miller and Dr. Sven Schmitz discussed floating offshore wind on the ‘Growing Impact’ podcast series hosted by the IEE Institute at Penn State. You can access the podcast episode and transcript here: ‘Growing Impact’ looks at wind energy, floating offshore wind turbines
New Publications Available
Two new publications are now available, one focusing on the modeling of wind turbine rotor performance using distributed vorticity elements and the other is a study of different surface roughness geometries, one of which is similar to the hexagonal roughness found on ablated re-entry vehicle heat shields, and the corresponding influence on the streamwise turbulent flow.
You can find both publications here: https://fluids.psu.edu/publications/
Compressed Air Wind Tunnel (CAWT) Progress
The lab has been hard at work preparing the Penn State Compressed Air Wind Tunnel (CAWT) for shakedown runs. The flow conditioning, settling chamber, contraction, and most of the test section are in place. The fan is running and air is moving inside the facility. We are excited to share more results at the upcoming APS DFD conference in Washington, DC https://www.2023apsdfd.org/.
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Compressed Air Wind Tunnel: The Pressure Vessel
The main component of our new wind tunnel facility is the pressure vessel shell. The facility has been designed to optimize size while achieving moderately high pressures to create the ideal environment for testing at high Reynolds numbers. With a pressure rating of 500 psi, we can achieve 34 times the atmospheric density of air, and only minor increases in the viscosity.
Our facility is also large, with a maximum test section size of 40″ in diameter, meaning we can test relatively large models at very high Reynolds number values, approaching 1 million per inch.
