Author Description

For over half a century the NPS Aerolab Low Speed Wind Tunnel located in Halligan Hall of the Naval Postgraduate school has served to provide students and facility with meaningful aerodynamic data for research and problem analysis. New data acquisition hardware was installed three years ago but never fully verified, and contained no integrated software program to collect data from the strain-gauge balance pedestal. Existing National Instruments based hardware for the NPS low-speed wind tunnel was reconfigured to obtain data from the strain- gauge pedestal. Additionally, a data acquisition software program was written in LabVIEW(C) to accommodate the hardware. The Virtual Instruments (VI) program collects and plots accurate data from all four strain gauges in real-time, producing non-dimensional force and moment coefficients. A research study on the performance of an OH-6A helicopter fuselage was conducted. NPS Aerolab wind tunnel tests consisted of drag, lift, and pitching moment measurements of the OH-6A along yaw and angle-of attack sweeps. The results of the NPS wind tunnel data were compared against testing conducted on a full-scale OH-6A helicopter in NASA Ames' 40 ft. x 80ft. wind tunnel, along with the U.S. Army's Light Observation Helicopter (LOH) wind tunnel tests. Results of current testing substantiate the LabVIEW(C) code.