Wind tunnel experiments of novel wing configurations for design and customisation in an industry 4.0 environment

Abstract

Industry 4.0 requires validated simulations for rapid customisation and through-life designs. Wind tunnel experiments have been widely used in validating flow-field simulations for aircraft design and manufacture. In this paper, we perform the experiments for simulating the NACA0015 model wings in various shapes and angles of attacks (AoA) through an anatomy wind tunnel. Particle traces are recorded during the tests and then analysed with PIVlab and Tecplot for validating streamlines and vorticity distributions. The experimental results have shown that the wing shape with a relatively large angle of sweepback and an AoA ranging from +10 to +15deg possess better aerodynamic behaviours for an aircraft than with other settings. Also, we have discussed the prospects of aircraft simulations in an Industry 4.0 context.