Compartmentalized

The debate of whether to make an open or closed-circuit wind tunnel has come to a close. The winner is: both? In the interests of convenience, I'm going to make the various components of the tunnel highly separable. I have a collar mechanism in mind, and will try to put the information up on the website, sometime tomorrow. For the sake of making the engineering easy, I'm going to try to have two primary sizes: test-section, pre-constriction (also known as small and large).

If you model the wind tunnel as a test section, followed by a really long diffuser, then a contraction, then the axial fan would, usually, go somewhere in the middle of the diffuser. In my case, diffusers are complicated to build, and so I'm going to try to make the diffuser fit between the test-section and the second corner. Doing so would allow me to hide all of the intermediate sizes in three sections (first diffuser section, first corner, second diffuser section). All other collars would be either small or large.

I'll start designing tomorrow, and start stubbing out a python file to perform the pressure-drop estimates, etc., and we'll see how feasible this plan is.