Wind Tunnels: State of Art Survey and Future Scope for Testing Micro Air Vehicles

Through the years the growth of Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAV) has gained increasing interest among engineers in the applications of military and civil domains.However obtaining accurate aerodynamic flying characteristics of MAV's was considered difficult due to their small size, the nature of their very low Reynolds's number as well as the lack of testing methods.To overcome these complexity, the MAV's can be tested by using a subsonic open circuit micro scaled wind tunnel.This paper presents the development of wind tunnels analyzed from research journals from the year 1937 to 2015 in order fabricate a micro scaled model of the tunnel to test the fundamental aerodynamics of a MAV flying at low speed and low Reynolds's number.The study clearly indicates that micro scaled wind tunnels are certainly bringing infinite possibilities to studying and understanding the in-flight characteristics of very small aircrafts flying at the low speeds and having low aspect ratio.