Development of a Low-Turbulence Transverse-Gust Generator in a Wind Tunnel

This work demonstrates the viability of a novel transverse-gust generator that is capable of producing a controllable time-varying gust without increasing the turbulence level within a large region of the flow facility. The new gust-generator concept is based on a vortex-generator array along one of the walls of a facility’s test section at a given streamwise location. Using such a device, a steplike gust and a sinusoidal gust with amplitudes of 5.7% of freestream velocity are demonstrated in a wind tunnel. The sinusoidal gust produces practically pure-harmonic oscillation in the freestream’s direction of at a frequency of 2 Hz for a freestream speed of . A simplified vortex-array model is shown to be a viable tool for the design of the new gust generator. This study is focused on demonstrating the concept of the gust generator while leaving the generator’s design optimization and the exploration of the limits of the gust strength and uniformity to future work.