High Speed Of The Wind Tunnel Balance Calibration Software Design And Implementation

Wind tunnel test is a very important mean for aerodynamics research. It provides theoretical basis for the research and design of various aircrafts and high-speed vehicles. In the process of wind tunnel experiments, the data acquisition and force situations come from the six degrees of freedom wind tunnel balances bearing proportioned models. Strain gauge balances are the equipments to measure the forces and moment of forces applied on aircraft or vehicle models in wind tunnel tests. Eventually, it is very difficult to create wind tunnel balances equal, manufacturing errors make the balance have poor consistency. It is a must to calibrate errors between the balance loads and specific balances or stress-strain distortion to obtain high precision of force test. For this reason,home and abroad aerodynamics or wind tunnel research institutions attach great importance to develop wind tunnel balance calibrating technology.Wind tunnel balance calibration is the key link of the research and design of wind tunnel balance. Computational formulas and calibration coefficients directly determine the accuracy, availability, quality of data obtained in wind tunnel tests. At the present time, in our department, the program was designed referred to troublesome Calculating by manpower. Although this program could ease work load at some extent, there were obvious defects in data accuracy, calculating and calibrating degrees of automation too. This program was written in Basic language and ran on DOS operating system; the Human-computer interactive Interface was not very friendly, also uneasy to operate. In order to improve calibration quality of wind tunnel balance and promote efficiency, our department decided to research and designs a new and more advanced calibration program for wind tunnel balance.The new designed program runs on Windows Operating system with friendly GUI interface. It monitors and controls the voltage of power while it collects output signals from wind tunnel balance to differentiate whether it works in stable status. For the inferior quality points of load, the system could reload separately and redo data acquisition. It is very convenient to arrange unit load tables, also improved computing methods for crossing load table and synthesized calibrating formulas. While in the course of integrated calibration, the system could calculate force loads in real time and could find and correct errors from calibrating status or wrong loads in time. In same working condition, to calibrate the same wind tunnel balance with new designed program and original program, we concluded that the factors for formulas of computation for the two programs kept basically consistent, there is a only small difference, but fairly reasonable. The synthesized calibrating and computing errors by the new program are less than those by original program. All tests demonstrate that new designed program satisfies the requirements; it was already permitted and authorized to calibrate wind tunnel balances.