Wind Tunnel

Wind Tunnel

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I had the opportunity to perform some flights inside the University of Glasgow Wind Tunnel Facilities, also called “The De Havilland Tunnel”, which has a test section of 9ft × 7ft (2.7m × 2.1m) and can do maximum speeds of 70m/s (156mph).

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HexRacer and airplane scale model inside the Wind Tunnel at the University of Glasgow

This video (if its good enough…) it will be use for promotional material around the University of Glasgow.

I chose my new hexacopter racer to do this work, and I just outfitted a video transmitter and a mobius camera. My idea was to perform the flights doing FPV, but due to the “tight” spaces between my vehicle, the tunnel and the model installed (metallic scale model of an airplane) it was too risky to do it in that way, so I had to get inside the tunnel and perform the flights using my eyes, this also proved to be complicated, but at the end I managed to get some footage that will be analysed by media team to see if the can insert it somewhere on the promotional videos…

Something to consider is that if you are in a tunnel, close to the ground, you will suffer from ground effect and will cause instabilities… while being to close to the ceiling, it happens something similar, the rotors have more trouble generating the lift to keep the vehicle level and in the same altitude, and also causes some nasty behaviors on the vehicle.

ground effect

The only thing that did not happen was crashes… I tried to be extra careful to avoid hitting the tunnel and more particular, the model.

I produce some great gifs:

Drone flyby airplane

And a great video:

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