Students: Seth Guiler, Michael Kelly, Emily Pace, and Jonathan Vailes
The objective of this project was to add pressure sensing capabilities - a pitot-static tube - to the existing department wind tunnel in order to enable more quantitative measurements. We designed and implemented a setup that measures the dynamic pressure of the fluid and outputs the corresponding flow velocity utilizing Bernoulli’s equation. The pressure value needed to calculate velocity is the difference between stagnation pressure and static pressure, which is the dynamic pressure. We connected a pitot static tube to a differential pressure sensor to measure the value. This sensor relays the value to MATLAB where the pressure values are converted to velocity values.
To prove the concept we loaded up our setup in a car and took a ride on the interstate. We tested our setup at different speeds and compared the calculated values to the speedometer values. The results were accurate concluding this setup’s effectiveness at measuring wind speed. This assured that the readings gathered in the wind tunnel were generally accurate. A PDF version of a poster we presented at the Union University Scholarship Symposium can be found here.
