This week, testing continued at full speed ahead! Now that manufacturing has been completed, the manufacturing subteam was hard at work testing our top plates. Two weeks ago, a preliminary test was conducted on the 45-degree orifice top plate to ensure all of the systems and measurement instruments functions as intended. After we ironed out some of the kinks for testing, the remaining top plates were tested this week. In order to test even more angles, the top plates were also tested in reverse. With this week now wrapping up, we’ve officially ran tests for 30 degree, 45 degree, 60 degree, 120 degree, 135 degree, and 150 degree conditions. Very excited about this progress, and looking forward to analyzing the results in the near future! Below is a picture of the imaging used during one of our tests.

On the CFD front, our ANSYS subteam continued to improve upon the conditions of the simulations. We ran into some hurdles while updating the designs to better match the experimental setup in the wind tunnel. Time was dedicated to fixing the updated simulations this week. The new designs ended up being more complex than the old ones, so more simulation time was required. Also, some of the initial conditions and boundary conditions needed changes. As these fixes are made, the simulations are getting closer to giving data from simulations that match our experimental setup. The goal is to compare this the wind tunnel and ANSYS data, then utilize ANSYS to test even more conditions than we have in the wind tunnel!