Temperature Variation of Optical Sensors on a wing during wind tunnel tests

Abstract

In this paper, wind tunnel measurements are presented for the airflow fluctuation detection using pressure optical sensors. A number of 21 wind tunnel test runs for various Mach numbers, angles of attack and Reynolds numbers were performed in the 6’×9’ wind tunnel at the Institute for Aerospace Research at the National Research Council Canada (IAR/NRC). A rectangular finite aspect ratio half wing, having a NACA 4415 cross-section, was considered with its upper surface instrumented with pressure taps, pressure optical sensors and one Kulite transducer. The Mach number was varied from 0.1 to 0.3 and the angles of attack range was within -3 to 3. Unsteady pressure signals were recorded and a thorough comparison, in terms of unsteady and mean pressure coefficients, was performed between the measurements from the three sets of the pressure transducers. Temperature corrections were considered in the pressure measurements by optical sensors. Comparisons were also performed against theoretical predictions using XFoil CFD code, and mean errors smaller than 10% was noticed between the measured and the predicted data.