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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.