Concepts and engineering of wind & weather facilities based on fan arrays

In 2015, we imagined a fan array wind facility that could generate spatially and temporally varying flowfields within which a free-flying vehicle (drone) could be tested. The concept of a fan array wind facility is not new and the idea of free-flying vehicles in an airstream has a long history. The novelty lies in the modular technology (WindShaper^TM), enabling the shift from a permanent installation (such a conventional wind tunnel) to a completely flexible, tunable, small footprint, mobile wind generating facility, whose size and shape can be modified at will. The testing environment also includes a Motion Capture environment and/or onboard sensors that allow novel measurement paradigms on freely flying vehicles, which were unimaginable in the past with conventional sting-tethered models in constant speed wind tunnels. Weather (snow and rain) can be easily implemented.