The Wind Tunnel project | Project Sierra



As some of you know, my main goal in life is to launch multiple companies and head them as their CEO one of those companies is a car company. I started working on it when I was 10 years old with my best friend and a person who at that time, I thought was my best friend. 1 week into the project, the supposed best friend stole all our blueprints for the design of the car and the diagram for the battery pack we had in mind for the car and didn't have any intention of returning it. My current best friend who was also part of the project quit after a month, as he wasn't motivated enough.

This brings us to the present where I finished the entire remodeling of the car to make it as aerodynamic as possible, but simulations can only test so much without turning my computer into a ticking time bomb. So, since I got a 3d printer for my 17th birthday i decided to make a small wind tunnel, to test out a print of the car and see where i need to run any corrections. I realised that this method would save me a lot of time and more importantly a lot of money as resting out a wind tunnel facility, isn't exactly cheap.

Hence, the birth of PROJECT SIERRA (I like giving cool nicknames to projects, live with it). It took me about 2 days to research the necessary calculations that need to be taken for PROJECT SIERRA to be a success. One of those was the Contraction ratio which after some research I found out that a 9:6 ratio is best for testing automotive objects (AKA cars). I also calculated the angles needed to achieve the 9:6 contraction ratio in a project of this size. For those who are new to the field of Aerodynamics and Fluid Dynamics, we need to add a contraction from the testing chamber to the air inlet as that way the air can slow down when it gets pressurized. This allows us to see the airflow better and it also reduces the chance of turbulence forming.

I have introduced a stabilisation area so that the air entering the test chamber would move in a streamlined flow, which would help give me more accurate results.

I have added a 12V 20cm fan to help pull the air into the wind tunnel. The reason I am making the fan pull in air from the stabilising chamber to the testing chamber is that if we were pushing air there would be a lot of turbulence. I have also added a DC booster module that I can regulate the fan speed to make sure it spins at the optimal rate.I have given myself 2 ways to introduce smoke I can actually see the air moving. Option 1 has a higher chance of success in this model though so I would probably go with that.

The entire model would come out to be 1.2 meters in length and a max of 30 cm in height and breadth.

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