Wind ON!

So the time has finally come, after almost three months of preparation the wind tunnel tests are finally ready to begin this week. I don't know if I have given a substantial description of the wind tunnel test so I'll do that now.

So the UH-60L (or UH-60 Lima if you want to sound like an engineer here), the US Army owns well over 1000 of these. One of the most widely used helicopters in terms of flight time. So naturally NASA would choose the UH-60 as a validation for various computational simulations. Let me backtrack, computer simulations of helicopters are really bad at the present. Usually they can only apply to hovering helicopters (not flying forward) or helicopters that don't have a fuelslage. So they aren't very useful for real world development, or rather they aren't as useful as they are for fixed wing aircraft. Its not that the simulations can't model rotorcraft, its that the uncertainity becomes so large its not really worth it for smaller projects. This is why developing rotorcraft is so time consuming and expensive. But, I digress.

So the wind tunnel test, this rotor system is instrumented with almost every sensor NASA owns. Presure tabs, strain gauges, balances, laser systems, etc. The purpose of all of this is to create a database of measurments that future rotorcraft development software can be compared against. So where do I fit into this picture? I got another job! I get to moniter all of these channels in real time and make sure that they don't exceed certain values. If they do exceed the values it might mean the test stand might tear apart and fly down the tunnel and tare up the drive system. In case it wasn't clear thats not a good thing. So yeah the wind is going to be turned on this Wednesday, who knows maybe it will be a show.