Evaluation of the porosity parameter for a perforated wall wind tunnel using measured wall pressure distributions

Abstract

The existing analytical methods for determining and correcting the effect of wind tunnel walls on experimental data are based on the hypothesis of potential flow. A useful simplification of the boundary conditions used to describe the perforated walls was to consider the wall as homogeneous, the solid and free portions not being treated separately, but as an equivalent permeable surface. The approximation of the wall behaviour during the experiment was possible by defining a porosity parameter. The purpose of this paper is to estimate the porosity parameter for the perforated walls of a trisonic wind tunnel by evaluating the pressure distributions measured on the walls of the test section.

Keywords

• wind tunnel
• wall pressure distributions
• porosity parameter
• perforated wall