Tutorial - Andrea Colli

TUTORIAL

Andrea Colli

Politecnico di Milano, Italy

Wind-tunnel testing has played a key role in the development of aerospace technologies and will continue to be a fundamental tool for research and industry as the demand for innovation is ever-growing.

The goal of this tutorial session is to give an overview of the capabilities of wind-tunnel testing, illustrating the wind tunnel itself with its main features, and dealing with the strategies and general recommendations on conducting a typical test campaign, but also the most common challenges it entails.

A special focus will be given to the measurement techniques employed in wind tunnels, from more typical loads measurements to more complex and recent tools such as Particle Image Velocimetry, with an indication of some of the best practices in use nowadays. A series of experiments on a compound-configuration helicopter model, performed in the Large Wind Tunnel of Politecnico di Milano in 2022, will be taken as a practical example to better illustrate the topics.

Andrea Colli received a B.S. degree in Aerospace Engineering and a M.S. degree in Aeronautical Engineering from Politecnico di Milano in 2015 and 2018 respectively, and is now completing a Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering at the same university. His field of interest is rotary-wing aerodynamics, in particular in blade-vortex interaction and rotor-wake interaction for next-generation aircraft. As part of his research he has conducted extensive wind-tunnel test campaigns, including Mach-scaled model rotor testing, employing a variety of measurement techniques ranging from Particle Image Velocimetry to unsteady pressure measurements.