VIRTUAL WIND TUNNEL: a simulation with real scientific data

Application Domain

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The Virtual Wind Tunnel represents a typical use of INSCAPE in the Science and Industry domain.

The main goal of this application is to provide a means to simulate the use of a wind tunnel, through virtual experiments that give real results. As such, it’s also an ad-hoc wind tunnel simulator, in the sense that virtual experiments will be possible on the provided object (an acrobatics plane), because the fluid dynamics results will have been previously collected from a real wind tunnel, and then stored in a database accessed by the application.  

Story Outline

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Users of the application will have the choice of visiting the Wind Tunnel, and/or engage in a Virtual Lab in order to conduct aerodynamics experiments on an acrobatics plane in the most efficient way (time-efficient). I.e. in the real world, the use of the wind tunnel is constrained by the wind tunnel schedule: clients have booked the wind tunnel for a few days and can’t exceed their time reservation, thus the need to optimize the order and type of their experiments. Each change of an aerodynamic parameter is time-costly, some are more costly than others, so the experiencing user generally has to choose the parameter changes that spend the less time and still manage to test every parameter in order to make a synthesis of data extracted from the tests.

The Virtual Tour section

In this section, the visitor will engage in a Virtual Tour of the windtunnel (in a first person view) and get an understanding of how it works. He/she will thus be able to visit the windtunnel building, outside and inside, collecting explanations during the visit.

The Virtual Lab section

In this section, the user will have to estimate flight qualities of the acrobatics plane through virtualized experiments: namely, the variation of incidence with no sideslip (useful for the phases of takeoff, cruise and landing), the stability, the deflection, pitching moment, the side stability, the stall study, etc.

To this aim, he/she will define an experimentation plan but he/she will also be able to modify parameters in virtual/real time such as the wind speed, the incidence and the sideslip, the flap deflection, some geometry modifications, some visual installations and some assembly modifications. However, he/she will also have to take care not to exceed his/her booking of the windtunnel. A time counter will always be present on screen (simulated time): time will generally increment in real time, but will also jump non-continuously when time-costly operations are done. When a parameter change is requested and this parameter modification requires a human intervention, a typical video showing the intervention will be presented, and then the timer will be incremented by the duration of the operation in the real world. Each experiment will give results extracted from a database of real data collected during a one-week experiment campaign at Wind Tunnel S4 (ISAE).

Finally, the scenario will generate graphical results so that the user is able to do a synthesis of data extracted from the tests.
 

Highlighted INSCAPE Features

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In this scenario, we will be using many INSCAPE core features, most of them related to the Story Editor, Stage Editor and to using code snippets. The following capabilities will be specifically emphasised in this story:

Combining a 3D environment, 2D graphics and video in a single story

Implementing story transitions through a 2D User-interface representing the real windtunnel pilot interface

Keeping track of a simulated time

Accessing external scientific data from within Inscape

Generating scientific results in the form of 2D graphics