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Measurement capabilities and Instrumentation

Force/Torque sensors:

The wind tunnel has a pitch/yaw model positioning system equipped two six-axis force/torque stings:
Shaft
[inch]		 Normal
[N]		 Side
[N]		 Axial
[N]		 Pitch
[N-m]		 Yaw
[N-m]		 Roll
[N-m]
3/8 44 44 18 1.7 1.7 5.6
1/2 267 160 67 13.6 7.9 9.0

In addition, the lab has a range of commercial 6-component force/torque sensors that can be custom-mounted and can resolve unsteady forces and torques (up to about 1kHz):

  • ATI Nano-17 17mm diameter; Fz = 70N, Fx,Fy = 50N Tx,Ty = 0.5Nm.
  • ATI Mini-40 40mm diameter; Fz = 240N, Fx,Fy = 80N, Tx,Ty = 4Nm.
  • ATI Delta IP65 126mm diameter; Fz = 1980N, Fx,Fy = 660N, Tx,Ty=60Nm.

Lastly we have a Futek TFF400 7 Nm torque sensor

Lasers, Cameras and PIV systems

We have LaVision PIV systems for 2D (planar), 3D (stereo) and 3D volumetric (Tomographic) PIV, and the use of several laser systems that are suitable for PIV, visualization, etc. These systems are used for measurements of velocity fields in both animal flight and engineering testing environments.

    • Pixtronix 10kHz 30mJ/pulse Nd:YTG 532 nm laser
    • Litron 200Hz dual pulse 100mJ/pulse 532 nm Nd:YAG laser
    • Quantel 15 Hz dual pulse 200mJ/pulse 532 nm Nd:YAG laser
    • New Wave 15 Hz dual pulse 15 mJ/pulse 532 Nd:YAG laser
    • Argon Ion 10W CW tunable laser

We also have multiple high speed cameras for PIV, imaging of animal flight kinematics and fluid-structure interactions..

Hot wires

We have multiple-channel hot wire anemometer systems and both single and x-wire hot wire probes. The probes can be mounted on 2-axis traverse for boundary layer and wake measurements.

Animal flight recording

For animal flight measurements, we have, as mentioned above, multiple cameras for 3D recording of body and wing kinematics, as well as tethered and wireless recording systems for measurement of muscle activity, acoustic fields, and inertial motion (3-axis acceleration and 3-axis angular velocity).