This week, our team has been focusing on creating our presentation for the PDR peer review this coming Tuesday. We met with our coach this week to discuss parameters and designs to include in the PDR and get approval from our liaison. He taught us concepts from compressible flow that are important to understand when designing our test components and told us about some problems we would have to solve to begin testing. One of these problems is that the atmospheric pressure (pressure in the room) is higher than that of the wind tunnel where we will be conducting our tests. Since our project requires extracting air from the test section, this is an issue because pressure travels from high concentration to low concentration. This means that instead of air flowing outward from the wind tunnel, the air will be flowing into the test section, which will cause damage to the system. This week has been a lot of discussion about how to fix this problem and continue to progress our project.

As mentioned last week, we have been finalizing the geometry of the isolator orifices. This has been another topic of extensive discussion. We decided to try simulating multiple configurations through Ansys CFD which is currently being worked on. Another consideration is manufacturing a few sets of plates to install into the wind tunnel that have different orifice geometries and simply running tests to get real physical data.

We also did our IPPD lab training this week and were joined by Team 1! The lab is very nice and we are all very excited to be able to work, prototype, and have meetings in here. Stay tuned to see what we come up with! See you next week.