Preliminary Test Results of NDA Cryogenic Wind Tunnel and Its System

In Japan, three cryogenic wind tunnels have been constructed with the same method of NASA since 1980: one for low speed and other two for transonic testings. Though both of the transonic cryogenic wind tunnels in Japan are small, one of them is the NDA cryogenic tunnel, and it has a larger cross sectional area of the test section (0.06 m in width, 0.30 m in height) than other one (NAL, 0.10 m in width, 0.10 m in height), and is the newest cryogenic wind tunnel in Japan. It was designed for testing transonic airfoils and other basic researches of fluid mechanics, and constructed with the stainless steel of SUS 304 and the centrifugal compressor in 1985. The results of preliminary operational and calibration tests al ambient and cryogenic temperatures indicate that the NDA cryogenic tunnel has sufficient potential to perform transonic flow experiments at cryogenic temperature although several problems associated occured.