Category Archives: Wind Tunnel

Bridge Over Trebled Water: How the Golden Gate Bridge Started to Sing

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Throughout the spring, some Bay Area residents from Marin County to the Presidio noticed a sustained, unplaceable high-pitched tone. In early June, the sound reached a new peak volume, and recordings of the eerie noise spread across Twitter and Facebook. Soon after, The Golden Gate Bridge, Highway, & Transportation District, …read more

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The Wright Flyer: Engineering And Iterating

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The types of steps and missteps the Wright brothers took in developing the first practical airplane should be familiar to hackers. They started with a simple kite design and painstakingly added only a few features at a time, testing each, and discarding some. The airfoil data they had was wrong and they had to make their own wind tunnel to produce their own data. Unable to find motor manufacturers willing to do a one-off to their specifications, they had to make their own.

Sound familiar? Here’s a trip through the Wright brothers development of the first practical airplane.

Starting Out:

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Non-Computational Fluid Dynamics

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Computational Fluid Dynamics, or CFD, and is applied to everything from aircraft design to how good of a wing a new skyscraper will be. Of course, the science of building airfoils is much older than CFD, leading to the question of how airfoil design was done before computers.

The answer, of course, is a wind tunnel. Walk around a few very good air museums, and you’ll find wind tunnels ranging from the long wooden boxes built by the Wright brothers to fantastic plywood contraptions that are exceptionally interesting to woodworkers.

[Joel] needed final project as an upcoming aeronautical engineer, but …read more

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