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Science

NASA Ames Research To Close Largest Windtunnels 118

Posted by michael from the overtaken-by-events dept.
Makarand writes "The world's largest and second largest wind tunnels operated by the NASA Ames Research center will be shutdown after 60 years and may remain shut unless major defense contracts from the Pentagon or the private sectors are available. The largest windtunnel will be fired up for the last time in June for four hours. It will test the parachutes that will land the Mars exploration rovers onto the Red Planet next year. Fewer defense contracts and the increasing use of computer simulations are being cited as reasons for the windtunnels to face closure."
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NASA Ames Research To Close Largest Windtunnels More

NASA Ames Research To Close Largest Windtunnels

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  • blows (Score:5, Funny)

    by aardwolf204 ( 630780 ) on Sunday May 18, 2003 @05:33AM (#5984720)
    That really blows. No, really.

  • Simulation jobs (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by Harbinjer ( 260165 )
    So, maybe I can get one of the simulation jobs to replace the wind tunnels

    FP!

  • Well blow me... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Currawong ( 563634 ) <sd.accounts@amos@io> on Sunday May 18, 2003 @05:34AM (#5984724) Homepage Journal
    ...at $5000/hour.

  • Funride (Score:5, Funny)

    by cra ( 172225 ) on Sunday May 18, 2003 @05:36AM (#5984728) Homepage
    I bet they could find a way to make a pretty cool amusement ride out of it.
    • It'd be even more amusing watching others riding:

      whooooooo! *splat*

    • Re:Funride (Score:3, Interesting)

      by CvD ( 94050 )
      Put it on end and you have a vertical windtunnel [skyventure.com], a great "ride". It's a little difficult to learn to stay stable, but its a lot of fun. Skydivers use vertical windtunnels a lot to train their maneuvers. But also people who don't wanna jump out of an airplane but do wanna know what it feels like to float on air, the vertical windtunnel is the answer.

      Cheers,

      Costyn.
    • I bet they could find a way to make a pretty cool amusement ride out of it.

      Women must wear skirts :-P
    • You could play who can stay on their feet the longest.

  • I’m surprised. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by insecuritiez ( 606865 ) on Sunday May 18, 2003 @05:37AM (#5984730)
    Super computers are great for this sort of research. But I'm surprised that large wind tunnels aren't still needed. The space gained by scrapping the tunnels will be taken up again by climate controlled rooms to house expensive super computers. You'd think that there would be needs where only the largest wind tunnels would do. I guess not any more.

    • Re:I'm surprised. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Currawong ( 563634 ) <sd.accounts@amos@io> on Sunday May 18, 2003 @06:06AM (#5984775) Homepage Journal
      Despite the advances in super computer technology that allow the behaviour of even very complex materials to be tested in a virtual environment, a wind tunnel may still be a far cheaper and less time-consuming option, especially with one-off experiments (such as for the Mars landing parachute mentioned in the article). The wind tunnel tests the actual thing, and although it takes time to setup, a supercomputer takes a considerable amount of time, work and money to program to mimic the effects of the wind tunnel and the item being tested.

      • Re:I'm surprised. (Score:5, Informative)

        by hackstraw ( 262471 ) * on Sunday May 18, 2003 @09:20AM (#5985104)
        Yeah, but the article said that the things were "hardly used". To quoteth the parent post:

        wind tunnel tests the actual thing

        The largest one could house a 737, which is not that large of a plane, and it can only attain a speed of 140 mph. What good is that? This is a very small subset of the "actual thing". I mean if you already went to the expense of creating a fullsize preproduction aircraft, why not throw a robot pilot, a computer and some sensors and fly the thing for real? Or throw a 1/4 size plane into a windtunnel that can test up to 700 mph?

        Subsonic air flight is pretty much old hat by now. "Real" windtunnels can do things at speeds up to mach 7 or so to test the interactions of heat/pressure/speed that approach chaotic interactions and are very difficult to model or conduct a real test, and these windtunnels are at the threshold of our current technologies. This is what I would like to see from NASA. I see this as a sign of progress, not a sign of budget cuts.
        • The main reason for testing in the high-reynolds, low speed regime is to make sure the damned thing takes off and lands. It doesn't matter how fast it goes in the air; it still has to take off and land in a reasonable distance. This part of flight isn't the most glamorous, but it's the bread and butter of real-flow testing.

          As far as "flying the thing for real", it's very hard to get a 3-D picture of the flow around an aircraft in flight, especially if it isn't flyable yet.
        • Look up the Pi Similarity theorem some time. With it, you can take all the relevant equations of interest (Navier-Stokes) and determine how the physical units scale with respect to interesting ratios. In other words, if you're intereted in the Reynolds number, you may find that as long as you scale a characteristic length with the inverse of viscosity, for example, the Reynolds number will remain constant. Using this technique you can study all sorts of interesting things that you could not ordinarily te
          • Indeed Buckinham (sp?) Pi therom is great. And simplifies things greatly. But you can't just ditch windtunnls for computers. As my fluids book pointed out. For much of fluid dynamics there is no exact solution. Only approcimations (sp?). Take Reynolds number. There is still no perfect understanding for laminar->turbulent transition. All we have is experimental data. For many computer models everything will be at the mercy of guesses and approximations. For things like this windtunnels are inval
            • I guess the point I was trying to (poorly) make was that apparently the world doesn't need giant 120' x 80' foot windtunnels anymore, because similar results can be had with smaller windtunnels and e.g. higher mass flow raters or a different viscosity, or whatever.
              • You can scale by pushing the air molecules closer together. That's what the 12 foot pressure tunnel (also being shut down) did.

                Cryogenic tunnels do the same thing by cooling the gas; it's a bit safer too.

      • Re:I'm surprised. (Score:1, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        I used to have a sign on my desk (when I was a hardware kind of guy, not the snivering software type I've now become) that said:

        "One test is worth 1,000 expert opinions."

        Translated, this means that there's nothing quite like empirical data to verify analytical results. The gathering of this empirical data is best done in a controlled environment, NOT post-production!
    • Well, supercomputers are super computers.

      However, no software is perfect.
      Isnt the surest way of knowing how an object will behave in the wind is to run it through a wind tunnel?

      After all, consider sending a probe to mars. What if the parachute checked out OK in a computer simulation, but doesn't apply to real physics because of some bug?

      Its not a matter of money, but a matter of time.
      To see a probe destroyed after years of hard work is very sad, especially when it could have been avoided by placing it i

      • Re:I’m surprised. (Score:5, Funny)

        by FTL ( 112112 ) <slashdot@neil.fras[ ]name ['er.' in gap]> on Sunday May 18, 2003 @06:31AM (#5984819) Homepage
        > However, no software is perfect.

        I don't know, my "Hello World" program seems to be bug free. Be careful with sweeping generalisations.

        Isnt the surest way of knowing how an object will behave in the wind is to run it through a wind tunnel? After all, consider sending a probe to mars. What if the parachute checked out OK in a computer simulation, but doesn't apply to real physics because of some bug?

        Computers can do cute things like simulate the parachute in a Martian atmosphere. Which might be kind of handy given that the air density on Mars is 1% [aspsky.org] of Earth.

        For the simple stuff, there are wind tunnels. For everything else, there's computers.

        • Re:I’m surprised. (Score:4, Funny)

          by irc.goatse.cx troll ( 593289 ) on Sunday May 18, 2003 @06:44AM (#5984832) Journal
          "I don't know, my "Hello World" program seems to be bug free. Be careful with sweeping generalisations."

          Does it check if the output is writable? Does it do integrity checks on its memory(and itself) to verify there was no corruption or tampering?

        • Re:I’m surprised. (Score:2, Insightful)

          by nihilvt ( 212452 )
          For the simple stuff, there are wind tunnels. For everything else, there's computers.

          Wrong. For simple stuff there are computers, for everything else there's wind tunnels. Just because a computer can model something, does not mean we know how to model it.
        • In case it hadn't occured to you, a wind tunnel is a simulator too. It simulates the air flow dynamics of high speed air flow that an object would encounter if it was traveling at a given (high) speed.

          Computers can do cute things like simulate the parachute in a Martian atmosphere. Which might be kind of handy given that the air density on Mars is 1% of Earth.

          Gee, I guess it's impossible for an experimentor to be able to evacuate the air in a wind tunnel until it was 1% that of sea level on Earth....Wa

    • Re:I’m surprised. (Score:5, Informative)

      by Realistic_Dragon ( 655151 ) on Sunday May 18, 2003 @06:57AM (#5984854) Homepage
      Because of better understanding of flow equivalence it's much easier than it used to be to test models in small windtunnels.

      Reynolds numbers are roughly matched (by changing temperature and flow speed) to test in smaller-than-life wind tunnel tests, and it's now possible to do this for a much larger range of real word conditions (by using colder tunnels and high/low pressure and high velocity flows) with much smaller (ie cheaper) wind tunnels. It's also done much more accuratly, up to and including equivalent tests for supersonic and hypersonic flows. You just can't test a hypersonic (M5+) flow in a large wind tunnel, it would need a huge mass flow rate.

      Combine this with the availability of cheap supercomuter time and the fact that your 3D models can be used for aerodynamic testing, systems integration _and_ CAD/CAM (so you only need to build one virtual model and not four - saving a huge heap of cash) and you have a sharp decrease in the need for large wind tunnels.
      • Extreemly informative, thanks.

      • Re:I’m surprised. (Score:3, Interesting)

        by dim ( 10700 )
        Actually you can test higher than mach 5. The building I worked in at Ames had a gun tunnel in the basement [nasa.gov] That tested the shuttle among other things. It would shake the whole building when it went off.
        • The warning signs were always really interesting, something like "Do Not Enter - Artillery Fire". This was on my normal route to lunch.

          That link is really good; I wasn't aware of an online history. There were always tales of incidents, like this one:

          By mid-1975 thousands of blowdowns, during which air was heated above the melting point of steel, had taken their toll. A flange between the nozzle and heater failed, spewing high-pressure gas and incandescent pebbles over a wide area. The tunnel building

    • Re:I’m surprised. (Score:4, Funny)

      by Dark Lord Seth ( 584963 ) on Sunday May 18, 2003 @08:48AM (#5985029) Journal

      If they are going to use an AMD* based computers they'll need an EXTRA wind tunnel instead to cool them.

      * I got an AMD so I'm allowed to bash it :)

    • I would be very suprised if they "scrapped" the tunnels (tearing them down for scrap metal/extra parts)...There's surely lead and other toxics used in the construction and it would not be cost effective for the raw materials (I don't think there's another wind tunnel needing extra parts anytime soon.) The govt. is not known for demolitioning something they don't have to.

      Hangar 1 also at Ames (the hangar used for the USS Macon, a dirigible from the 1930's) has a bunch of lead and other chemicals (and, hence

  • This isn't absolutely horrid... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by TWX ( 665546 ) on Sunday May 18, 2003 @05:52AM (#5984751)
    Yeah, I can see how people aren't happy about this. We lose something that can be used under short notice if they're mothballed. We reduce the number of jobs. However, I won't go so far as to call this bad. We aren't likely to forget the technology that goes into these systems, and we can always build them again. If they only mothball them, they might be able to be refurbished and opened again, similar to how the US Navy's Battleship fleet was brought back into service for a time. If they raze them, it won't be as easy, but it'll still be possible.

    I'm just glad that the kind of world that built them isn't here. Not that widespread fear of terrorism, suspension of civil rights without public outcry, and widespread imperialism are good, but at least we're unlikely to see the kind of war that ravages an entire continent for a decade, or at least not ours.

    Note: I wrote this at almost three in the morning, so if it's a bunch of crap, that's probably why.
    • I'm just glad that the kind of world that built them isn't here.

      Oh, you mean the world that landed a man on the moon? Or perhaps the world that sent probes to the outer planets and, ultimately, out of the solar system entirely? Or maybe you're talking about the world that produced fast, reliable air transportation anywhere in the globe? Or could you be referring to the world that produced the hypersonic X-planes?

      Don't act like this wind tunnel was made to kill babies and burn villages. It was built b
      • "...don't act like this wind tunnel was made to kill babies and burn villages..."

        I'm fully aware of that. However, what were we doing sixty years ago? We were fighting the bloodiest war that the world has ever seen, that had more casualties than all other wars combined. That device was built to enable us to build materiel of war. It was to let "engineers" further the war effort. It's no shock that the "Army Corps of Engineers" are a group that are used in battle to complete necessary tasks, and have
      • Actually, I think that wind tunnel was made to burn villages. As I recall, it was specifically built to debug warbirds and not for the advancement of aeronautic science as you imply. There is plenty of documentation... so you don't have to take my word for it, maybe I'm misremembering the details.

        Try this excellent wind tunnel site clicky [nasa.gov] and see if I am wrong.

  • NOOO (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 18, 2003 @05:52AM (#5984752)
    What am I going to use to keep my video card cool..
  • Can it really cost *that* much to maintain these windtunnels?
    • The article says, "Ames will lay off 23 contractors and reassign 23 employees as a result of the shutdowns. The moves will save $12 million a year in operational costs, said George Kidwell, director of research and development at Ames."

      So yes, I say it takes major defense programs. Because only a tiny fraction of a programs overall budget will be dedicated to windtunnel work. And much of the analysis will be subscale. You'll only go full scale once the design is nailed down. Even then you need programs

    • The largest windtunnel requires something like 6 megawatts of power while in operation. NASA has their own transformer farm onsite, and they have to arrange with their host city of Santa Clara whenever they want to run it to avoid blacking out the city.

  • In further news (Score:5, Funny)

    by thynk ( 653762 ) <slashdot AT thynk DOT us> on Sunday May 18, 2003 @05:53AM (#5984755) Homepage Journal
    The experiments formally tested at this wind tunnel site have been moved to congress. An unnamed NASA reseacher was quoted as saying "There is just so much hot air expelled there, it seemed redudant to have a wind tunnel. In fact, we're also looking at this thus untapped resource as a possible source for energy".

    NASA is also looking into tapping the "natural gas" deposits found around the nation's Taco Bells.

  • Testing?? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by photonic ( 584757 ) on Sunday May 18, 2003 @05:54AM (#5984757)
    The largest windtunnel will be fired up for the last time in June for four hours. It will test the parachutes that will land the Mars exploration rovers onto the Red Planet next year.
    With both of the Mars rovers practically on the launch pad (one lauches in June, one in July) isn't it a bit late to test the parachutes now? Have they found another last minute metric convertion error??
    • Exactly how long before the shipping date of a project do you usually finish testing?

    • With both of the Mars rovers practically on the launch pad (one lauches in June, one in July) isn't it a bit late to test the parachutes now? Have they found another last minute metric convertion error??

      see this is one of the reasons a windtunnel is better than software. if there is a problem in software you might never know until the real "stress test" happens, but a wind tunnel is a practical stress test - where the environment is replicated using real physics as much as possible (rather than softwar

  • I thought???? (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I always thought Rush Limbaugh was the world's biggest wind tunnel?

  • Racing... (Score:2, Informative)

    by JakiChan ( 141719 )
    I don't know about aerospace, but I know that even with the fancy computer simulations a lot of motorsports teams use windtunnels to test their designs. All of the biggest Formula 1 teams have them. Not being able to test in a windtunnel was supposedly one of the reasons that Jaguar (a.k.a. Ford) sucked so bad last year, and yet they certainly have the necessary computer gear. For some reason there are improvements that can only be tested in a windtunnel.
    • True, ask people like Newey and Brawn and they'll tell you that using computers, i.e. computational fluid dynamics, isn't enough. There are certain things learned from using a model in a wind tunnel that you simply can't get from a computer...yet.

      Last year Jaguar sucked cause they didn't have a wind tunnel. This year they suck because they have a driver who can't keep the car on the track, and runs over his own mechanics.

      Go McLaren!
      • Yeah, their big, but someone should call the Nascar guys. Not only could they test individual cars, they could test how cars interact with each other (which is always the bane of wind tunnel testing. You get the car to play real nice in the breeze, but it handles like crap in traffic).

    • Re:Racing... (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Computational Fluid Dynamics(CFD) can never fully replace wind tunnel testing, as CFD cannot calculate all of the parts involved, it drops some of the less significant portions to save time. I have been told that if all portions were calculated, it would take roughly 100 years to figure out the flow over something like a 747. The result from CFD is 'good enough' but cannot guarantee that some small effects will be magnified into a much bigger one by some synergy. The airplane manufacturers guarantee certain
    • In motorsports there is a strong interaction with the ground that isn't there with an aircraft in mid-air. A number of wind tunnels are being built with "rolling road" surfaces. The airflow generated by the rotating wheels is pretty significant and difficult to accurately simulate computationally. Of course, even if you have a good computational model you have to test it against the "real world" eventually, and the point of using wind tunnels in motorsports is so that you minimize the aero-related surprise

  • recipe for failure (Score:2, Insightful)

    by prgrmr ( 568806 )
    More and more science is relying upon computer simulations in the place of Real World testing. Simulations are only as good as the infomation available to create them. If we really knew everything we needed to know about a particular application of scientific theories, we wouldn't need to run simulations, just to verify against a rather long and complex checklist.

    • Re:recipe for failure (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      There is quite a bit of computer science and simulation when you run a wind tunnel. The data is pulled off then "massaged" to correct for wall effects, the presence of the sting (the thing that connects the model to the tunnel) and various other things. Its good to have both CFD and wind tunnels, neither is infallible.
    • I agree. To paraphrase something I was once told about comment statements:

      A simulator only tells you what a thing should do, not what it actually does.

  • Fan for computer. (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Can i buy one of those fans for my computer?

    Maybe i could buy the wind tunnel and move in like
    they did with those old missle silo's. It could be
    sleeping on air every night. I guess you could be
    flipping around in there unless you ate a balanced diet.
    The upside is no one would hear you fart.
    • have we really devolved so far?
      we went from:
      In space no one can hear you scream
      to:
      in this wind tunnel no one can hear you fart.

      I'm surprised you didn't mention that there was also no 'lingering' problem either, just whoosh!
    • Hey, neat idea. Let's see what they've got:

      The tunnel is driven by six 40-foot diameter fans that are powered by six 22,500 horesepower motors.

      22,500 horsepower... now that, my friends, is what I call a fan!

  • A sad day... (Score:3, Funny)

    by grahamlee ( 522375 ) <(moc.geelmai) (ta) (maharg)> on Sunday May 18, 2003 @06:24AM (#5984812) Homepage Journal

    Because now, everyone will have to use a third-largest wind tunnel, and just dream about the days when there was a second largest wind tunnel and even a largest wind tunnel.

  • Wow! This brings back some memories! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by The Mutant ( 167716 ) on Sunday May 18, 2003 @06:37AM (#5984824) Homepage
    My first job out of University was working as a computer operator at a wind tunnel [veridian.com].

    We did lots of commerical and military stuff, and I'm really not surprised to find the F117 and a few other machines that I prolly shouldn't mention not on their list of aircraft we helped build.

    For a young geek in Western New York, this was a radically cool job. When I started working there we used a bunch of IBM 1401's [geocities.com], at the time their largest single installation of these machines.

    Later we became a DEC shop, and beta tested their PDP 11/70 [telnet.hu] series of machines.

    Prolly the neatest thing - aside from the computers that is - were the models. There were a group of craftsman that would carefully, over a period of months and sometimes years, hand craft these incredibly accurate models of the various aircraft.

    But they weren't just static models, being integrated with hundreds of air pressure sensors.

    I worked on what was called the 'Data Reduction Team'; our machines captured, in real time, data from these sensors and later we could model the prototype aircrafts performance - should it be built that is!

    Far cheaper to spend a few months in a wind tunnel testing various models then to build the real thing and have it crash.

    When working we were a 24/7 shop, and although the money was good, that was the rub. The biz was largely defense driven, and after a few years I got tired of the binge and purge nature of working in defense.

    But the story had a happy ending, as I landed a gig at Bell Labs and never looked at the defense industry again.

    • The old Ames setup (Score:3, Interesting)

      by K-Man ( 4117 )
      I haven't worked there since the 80's, but at that time everything was run on PDP's, with VAXes upstream doing data reduction. It was ancient even for that time, and everything was configured on disk packs that fit into DEC's washing-machine sized hard drives.

      The Standardized Wind Tunnel System (SWTS) was run in all the subsonic and transonic tunnels, and we had a contractual obligation to fix any problem within two hours (the $5000/hour cost figure was the reason for that).

      The PDP's ran DEC's RSX-11M op

  • Fundraising? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Talez ( 468021 ) on Sunday May 18, 2003 @06:40AM (#5984828)
    Perhaps NASA could sell the old tunnels on eBay?

  • It's simply not (Score:3, Informative)

    by vogon jeltz ( 257131 ) on Sunday May 18, 2003 @06:50AM (#5984840)
    economical to operate such a beast, considering costs that are in the hundreds of thousands dollars per hour. The thing this windtunnel has going for it is its "full scale" character. You can test objects with a crossection of up to 12.1x24.4m^2. The_major_drawback is the maximum test speed of only 51m/s. Today, the big shots are tunnels which can do transonic speeds (up to Mach 0.9, or app. 300m/s). They are not full scale (it'd have power requirements in the order of_thousands_of megawatts). Every and each plane developpded by Airbus and Boeing is being thoroughly tested in tunnels. They are still needed, and will be for a while. Numerical methods only go so far and are mostly used in the early aerodynamical design phase. Polishing is always done in the tunnels because in order to obtain the precision needed to simulate an entire aircraft in 3D you'd probably need the power of a few hundred NEC "earth simulators" (no, I'm not kidding, that's what I do at university). By the way, the only tunnel I know of which is capable of simulating transonic flight (Reynolds numbers of 50e6 and above) is the European Transonic Windtunnel (www.etw.de).
    • Exactly true. These behemoths are low speed. Great for testing large (and full-scale models), but poor for testing at the speeds that the private and military sectors want to see.

      "Surely it doesn't cost that much to run". It incurs a cost to run, and yes it would be nice for science to keep open, but if it's running in negative dollars maybe it needs to go.

      As a wide-eyed recent Aerospace Engineering graduate, I rest assure that this is NOT being closed because of numerical methods. As for many other e

    • It can be economical (Score:3, Interesting)

      by sien ( 35268 )
      NASA stopped operating the Langely full scale wind tunnel [lfst.com] a number of years ago.

      However the Aerospace Engineering Department at Old Dominion University figured they could use the wind tunnel and started to operate it themselves and were able to both train students and make money from it.

      Recently the Wind Tunnel has been used to test full scale model of a Wright Flyer [wrightexperience.com] that is scheduled to fly at the end of this year.

      NASA may not be able to operate these facilities economically, but smaller groups that

    • I can say right now that both Boeing and Airbus Industrie have their own in-house wind tunnels that can do model testing of new airplanes. In fact, Germany's DASA--now part of the EADS group that includes Airbus Industrie--has excellent scale-model wind tunnels that were used to verify the aerodynamic design of the upcoming Airbus A380 super jumbo jet.

      Between that and today's supercomputers that can do large-scale computational fluid dynamics (CFD) very accurately, small wonder why large wind tunnels are f
  • Wow, these wind tunnels have a lot of uptime... They must run linux.

    Yeah I know its lame but im tired, and there are wolves chasing after me.

  • hope they keep the building (Score:4, Interesting)

    by wfmcwalter ( 124904 ) on Sunday May 18, 2003 @07:45AM (#5984929) Homepage
    I hope they keep the building (although if they're not using it, I suspect they won't).

    It adds another weird element to the already surreal aspect that Ames/Moffet presents, particularly to the north. There's a number of odd (nay, sinister) looking buildings, some positively Quatermassey domes, weird towers, and of course the giant rectangular intake of the wind-tunnel building. The whole place has a cool area 51 big science of the 60s feel about it.

    Combine that with the Mountain View city lot beside it, where they keep hundreds of trees and bushes in wooden boxes, ready to be transplanted, lined up in neat little rows - it looks a bit like the set of The Prisoner.

    Nearby is SGI's main campus, where they've build a couple of ultra-modern office buildings (not as short of cash as we may have thought). Given that SGI's major remaining customers are NASA and NSA, it's get another little piece of the "look what government money built" zone up by Shoreline.

    • Nice to see a post from a local in this thread.

      I never thought about the site as "Prisoner" like but indeed it is. These large structures are very visible from the 101 freeway that runs right by the base, but you can't really appreciate the sheer size of these structures until you're on the base right next to them.

      I live in Cupertino, just a couple of miles away. Back when Moffett Field was an active Naval Air Station, there was a yearly Air Show usually featuring the Blue Angels, acrobatic planes, mili
    • As the article notes, the 40x80 and the 12' were built during the war. The Ames library has a lot of interesting information in it, ranging from historical documents to books on the FFT.

      The 12', also being shut down, was also an interesting beast, operating at several atmospheres in a closed circuit. Someone once calculated that the compressed air had enough stored energy to blow the entire block-sized structure a half mile into the air. It was tested fairly carefully.

  • Local people will be happy (Score:5, Informative)

    by theinfobox ( 188897 ) on Sunday May 18, 2003 @08:49AM (#5985031) Homepage Journal
    During the early '90s, I was stationed at Onizuka AFB which is right next to the Moffet/Ames facility. Back then, the wind tunnel had so many customers they were trying to get permission to operate the wind tunnel earlier and later than usual. Why did they need permission for the local government? This thing was LOUD. Once I was in a classroom that was right next door to the tunnel. Right in the middle of the lecture, it sounded as if a giant air conditioner was turned on. When we went outside, we figured out that it was the wind tunnel - you had to shout to be heard. The local communities (which had houses about 1.5 miles away) always complained about the noise. They didn't want it operationg before 7:30AM or after 9PM. NASA supposedly begged to get exceptions to this rule because they had "customers lined up from all over the world."

    It is interesting to see now they don't have enough customers.

  • Kind of sad (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    My grandfather was one of the directors at mofet field when most of theses wind tunnels were being built. I know that he was one of the primary designers of the 40X80. When i was five, I got to tour the 40X80. It was awe inspiring to see the test platform, the rotors and gaze off into the darkness of the sheer scale of the tunnel from the inside.
  • Shrub is spending more on the military that has ever been spent. $380Billion is earmarked for Military. A further $80Billion was made available for occupying Iraq...and im sure that wont be the only two items spent on war.

    The point? The military is going to be nice and flush with cash, if anyone actually *wants* to use the tunnels, they will get $$$.
  • The wind tunnels could be seen as a possible point of compromise by Viking invaders [vwh.net]. Whaddya gonna do?
  • It goes to show that we'd rather pretend to know that something works, than know that something works. I'm a coder, and I love using computers for all sorts of tasks, but simulation is as only as good as the model you are using... how do you (in 20 years time) know that your model is accurate without a wind tunnel or actual tests to compare it with? My bet? I bet the wind tunnel simulator people will end up building wind-tunnels to comfirm their models.
  • I guess that really blows for the 23 contractors they're laying off....

    Or maybe it blows because it's not blowing...

    Or maybe it's just this comment that blows.
  • Right next to the big tunnel (well, the closest office building anyway) is the NAS group -- Numerical Aerodynamic Simulation [nasa.gov]. Their goal from their founding was to replace wind tunnels as much as possible with CFD (computational fluid dynamics).

    It sounds like things are working out the way they were intended to. It's not that wind tunnels will completely disappear, but we'll be able to use them to cross-check portions of computational results.

    And don't forget: wind tunnels can't test everything, even on

  • very encouraging (Score:2, Insightful)

    by bumblingbee ( 674152 )
    i just got my aero degree yesterday (literally)- it's already reassuring to see headlines like this everyday. on a more serious note, i'm continuing to a graduate degree in CFD studies, but it is a huge mistake to get rid of too many unique resources like this. our AIAA chapter just had a guy down from Langley speaking about research in such tunnels, and while I know they are antiquated, so is most prevalent consumer aerospace technology. regardless, the experimental side of aerodynamics is important; many

    • BB, I know that graduation parties can bring a good man down, but your post is hard to read. Split it in paragraphs and capitalize, man.

      I read your post because I am very much interested in the aeronautics field, but rest assured that 99% of the potential readers skipped it because of its bad formatting. That's really too bad.

      That said, you are entirely right. I did a brief stunt in numerical analysis and simulation. Most standard codes work well now (gotta love FORTRAN spaghetti plates) for sub-, trans

  • Add to that list the 16ft Transonic tunnel at Langley.
  • Now maybe I can get some sleep. Have you ever heard the howling these things make. Thankfully, they didn't run the wind tunnels nearly as often as the P-3s rattled my house.
  • In front of the main air intake for the main wind tunnel at Ames is a trailer park.

    Really. Exit 101 onto Shoreline N, then turn right on Space Park Way. Space Park Way ends at the trailer park, backed up against the NASA Ames boundary fence. The view driving down Space Park looks truly wierd, with a giant air intake, over a hundred feet high and much wider, towering over the trailer park.

    If anyone ever makes "The Slums of Silicon Valley", that's the location.

  • I hear the great big tunneler that made the channel tunnel was sold off privately, and now it stands in some guy's back yard (?)

    Also I heard of people using old aeroplane fans, pointed down, and then using the thrust to push themselves upwards, so they get an effect just like skydiving, but only a few feet off the ground. It was used for training and safety tests and such, could these be used like that? My guestimates figure you could do car-diving with wind tunnels that big!

    ^^^ ^^^ <- air
    |||0-|-<|
  • Another sign of NASA decay ...
    Rather sad though.
  • I used to work at Ames. Walking through the really big tunnel was amazing. The huge fan blades were beautiful... not just in a geeky way, they were made of wood!!! Not an adviseable thing to do while the tunnel was on! I bet they don't close down, and this rustles up money for them. I mean, simulations are nice, but in the end you get something you want to test with real wind, and the biggest tunnel can do this in actual scale... which is important.

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