Structural Characteristics of Wing Model for High-Speed Wind Tunnel Testing Fabricated by Combined Manufacturing of Additive and Subtractive Processes

Abstract

Abstract In this paper, the potentials of wing models fabricated by the combined manufacturing technique of metal additive and subtractive processes for high-speed wind tunnel testing are investigated. The previous works by authors have proven the feasibility of additively manufactured wing models for transonic wind tunnel testing. This work is an extension of those works by combining the additive manufacturing technique and the machining (subtractive) process to construct a wing model for high-speed wind tunnel testing so that the effectiveness of a model construction could be further improved in a systematic manner. The objectives of this paper are 1) to investigate the geometrical accuracies of wing models fabricated by the combined manufacturing technique, 2) to study the structural characteristics of such wing models, and 3) to explore the feasibility and capability of those wing models for high-speed wind tunnel testing. The proposed technique would be a tool for the fast production of wind tunnel models at low cost and enable multiple experiments with various wing designs while precisely realizing designed geometries and structural properties for aeroelastic evaluations.