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Shuttle Reviews: Wind Tunnel Work

Boeing test engineers stand in front of a 3.5 percent scale model of the Space Shuttle used in Mach 3.5 and 4 wind tunnel tests.
Boeing test engineers stand in front of a 3.5 percent scale model of the Space Shuttle used in Mach 3.5 and 4 wind tunnel tests. Boeing is conducting the tests to verify that design changes to the shuttles external tank bipod ramp and in the shuttle's roll manuever (following launch) have no unintended effects on the vehicle's performance or safety. The room shown here is a prep room. The aluminum model has 90 pressure sensors and 300 thermal sensors. The tests were conducted at the Calspan University of Buffalo Research Center, which employs shock tunnel facilities to provide fully flight-duplicated conditions to study hypersonic, hypervelocity aerodynamic flows. Additional wind tunnel testing was done in other NASA and government wind tunnels.

The primary objective of the wind tunnel testing was to evaluate, validate and verify the air loads and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD)-derived air loads for the areas on the External Tank that were redesigned -- the Bipod area and the Liquid Oxygen feed-line fairing.

There was no available wind tunnel large enough to accommodate the actual space shuttle (orbiter, ET and SRBs). So an accurate model, roughly 6.5 feet long by 3.5 feet high (3 percent actual size) was built at NASA Ames Research Center, studded with sensors, coated with pressure sensitive paint and thoroughly tested -- for more than 1,200 runs in the wind tunnels of Ames Research Center (ARC) in California and Arnold Engineering Development Center at Arnold Air Force Base in Tenn. and other wind tunnels throughout the country.