Hey there! My name is Siddhant and I go by Sid. I am a first year M.S. Mechanical Engineer here at Duke and I’m also pursuing the SOAR Graduate Aerospace Certificate. My research interests revolve around Aerodynamics, with a focus on wing design and aeroelasticity. In the future, I hope to pursue a PhD in this field! I wanted to use this class as an opportunity to begin learning about wing design and thus continued Ryne Wang’s Project from Spring 2021!

Contribution to Project

Although this project was an individual effort in Fall 2021, Ryne’s contribution helped provide a good base for me to build up from. Feel free to click here to check out my project page! The main steps in this project were as follows:

    1. Deciding how to enclose the experiment. A fish tank was used for this purpose.
    2. Designing a flow skeleton that would determine how water would be supplied to the system. For this, the EverFLO 5500 5.5GPM Pump was used. A reservoir was build into the tank to store water. Using the pump, water was made to overfill the reservoir such that the excess water would flow over an acrylic plate to which an airfoil was screwed.
    3. Designing a mechanism to vary the angle of attack as well as plate angle on which the airfoil was screwed on. This would make the apparatus applicable to various flow speeds for the same pump. For the angle of attack, a protractor was etched into the acrylic plate with 10 degree incremental markings. Thus, the angle of attack could be changed by a known and desired value as per necessary. For the plate angle, a scissor lift was printed and the trailing edge of the plate was made to rest on it. Using a screwing mechanism, the scissor lift helped change the plate angle from a rough range of 5 to 30 degrees.
    4.  Flow straighteners were the next order of business because water being pumped out of the EverFLO was far from    laminar and fully developed. Thus before the water airfoil, it was to be made as fully developed as possible to avoid as much error as possible.