Wind Tunnel Balances
The motivation to write this book came to me while sorting out material which the head of our institute, Prof. Bernd Ewald, had produced and collected on the subject of balances during his career. Following his retirement in 1998, he continued to work
on balance design, and although he had intended on summarizing his life experience with balances in the form of a book, he became side-tracked—he dedicated his time to rebuilding a famous flying wing aircraft, the Horton IV. On every visit to the office, the therefore brought with him a trunk full of wind tunnel balance documents, rather than throwing them away.
Together with the documentation I had collected at this time over my own 15 years of working with balances, I was therefore faced with deciding the fate of all this accumulated knowledge. The documentation comprised over six hundred articles related to wind tunnel balances and calibration machines and addressed such issues as operation over a wide temperature range or under large temperature gradients. Especially while reading through Prof. Ewald’s notes, it became clear to me that we had overcome innumerable design problems in the past that represented important solutions and experience that others could benefit from.
It eventually became apparent that the only solution to preserving this knowledge for future reference was to write a book, condensing this combined experience obtained over a period of 36 years. Although I started this endeavor well in advance of my own retirement, this 14 year lead time was still not sufficient to finish the project. It was also never evident to me whether the book would be outdated before publication.
The eventual role of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) was and is still not clear—to what extent wind tunnel testing would remain an important design tool for the aviation industry? In comparison with complicated and costly experiments employing contemporary techniques such as particle image velocimetry (PIV) or pressure /temperature sensitive paints (PSP/TSP), CFD appeared in many respects to be advantageous.
DOWNLOAD :- HERE