Designers of devices ranging from aircraft to wind turbine blades to helmets must understand the effects of wind currents on performance and efficiencies. Smoke trails can illustrate how the wind passes over and around an object, but can't determine the forces exerted by the wind on the object. For that, strain gage wind tunnel balances are required - extremely complex, six-degrees-of-freedom transducers to which models are mounted to determine behavior during wind tunnel testing. These transducers can cost as much as $40,000 and take up to a year to design, fabricate, and calibrate.
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