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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 July 2016
The main object of tests on models in wind tunnels is to obtain results of direct application to aircraft in flight. Unfortunately, the flow about a model in a wind tunnel is subject to constraints that are absent in flight, and so allowance must be made for these wind tunnel interference effects for the results to be meaningful.
There is a considerable body of information on the sources of wind tunnel interference and, so far as effects in steady flow are concerned, methods of estimating the corrections to be applied are generally available. They enable results of wind tunnel tests to be reduced to equivalent flight results with some measure of confidence. The situation is far less satisfactory for oscillating models. The additional interference effects due to frequency of the motion may be of too complex a nature or require too tedious a computation (particularly for a deforming model) for a reliable reduction of the results to flight conditions to be practicable.