| The concept of automatic data acquisition and processing was applied to the 12" subsonic wind tunnel at San Jose State University's Aerospace Engineering Department's facilities. Pressure transducers, position indicators, a dynamometer and a pitot tube traversing assembly were used to capture physical measurements. Their output signals were converted by a multichannel digital to analog board which, in turn, routed the data to LabVIEW for further processing. Processing included the creation of virtual instruments that automatically manipulated data to illustrate phenomena of interest to the field of aerodynamics. In addition to the construction and programming of the interface, several example virtual instruments were created, and the results of their operation were within reasonable error from sophisticated large-scale data acquisition systems. Experience was also gained from the use of a two-dimensional aerodynamic airflow simulation program and its use was analyzed. |
