New Methodology for Wind Tunnel Calibration Using Neural Networks - EGD Approach

One of the hardest tasks involving wind tunnel characterization is to determine the air-flow condition inside the test section. The Log-Tchebycheff method and the Equal Area method allow calculation of local velocities from measured differential pressures on rectangular and circular ducts. However, these two standard methods for air flow measurement are limited by the number of accurate pressure readings by the Pitot tube. In this paper, a new approach is presented for wind tunnel calibrations. This approach is based on a limited number of dynamic pressure measurements and a predictive technique using Neural Network (NN). To optimize the NN, the extended great deluge (EGD) algorithm is used. Wind tunnel testing involves a large number of variables such as wind direction, velocity, rate flow, turbulence characteristics, temperature variation and pressure distribution on airfoils. NN has the advantage that multilayer perceptron neural networks can describe a 3D flow area with a small amount of experimental data, fewer numbers of iterations and less computation time per iteration. The Fluent results are used to train and optimize the proposed NN approach. The validation of this new approach is achieved by experimental tests using the wind tunnel Price-Paidoussis of LARCASE laboratory. This wind tunnel has two test chambers; a first chamber with a section equal to 0.3 × 0.6 meter that provides a speed ranging from 0 to 60 m/s and a second chamber test with a section equal to 0.6 × 0.9 meter that provides a speed from 0 to 30 m/s.