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Abstract

The wind tunnel improvement project aims towards creating a wind tunnel which may be used by the USI Engineering Department for effective educational purposes. The wind tunnel is located in the University of Southern Indiana's fluids lab, and was originally constructed as a senior design project during the spring of 2015. In order to make it more of an effective educational tool for the department, the instrumentation design and interactive display was updated, calibrated, and reconfigured to allow for student and faculty projects to be showcased more easily. This project was divided into multiple design tasks; (1) Accurately measure and record lift and drag forces imparted on a test subject by using load cells, (2) Accurately measure and record wind speeds utilizing a differential pressure sensor, and (3) Create an interactive HMI screen to allow information to be interpreted by USI students and faculty. In order to accomplish these goals signal conditioning was performed using operational amplifiers. The programming for the wind tunnel was accomplished by using LabVIEW, this user-friendly software allowed for installable drivers from individual instrumentations. Future work includes enhancing the fan and linking the VFD to the HMI screen for virtual controls.

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