An Assessment of the Increase in Wind Tunnel Testing Requirements for Air Vehicle Development over the last Fifty Years

摘要

Future wind tunnel test requirements are very difficult to forecast due to the uncertainties of anticipating the future direction of national needs, budgetary pressures, military requirements, and evolving technology. Wind tunnel test history from past programs is often used as an indication of potential future wind tunnel test needs. Past history, in the form of wind tunnel test hours (most commonly referred to as "user occupancy hours") for each program, has been the primary metric used to portray test histories. This metric, while interesting, fails to take into account that a test hour in the early days of wind tunnel testing produced far less "data" than a contemporary test hour today. A more meaningful representation of historical wind tunnel test requirements would be the total amount of "data" obtained for each program. However, historical records are somewhat haphazard; and these measures are generally not available for many programs. Using available data rate trends from a variety of sources (in the form of runs or polars per test hour), more realistic "data" requirements history has been generated, showing a dramatic increase over the last fifty years in the data required for air vehicle development.