Research Facilities
The group's research is conducted in/using the following facilities:
Low-Speed, Low-Turbulence Wind Tunnel
The experimental research will be conducted at MSU’s closed-circuit 2.3-ft x 3.3-ft x 13.3-ft (height x width x length) low-speed, low-turbulence wind tunnel, located at Patterson Engineering Laboratories. The wind tunnel can reach speeds of up to 230 ft/s and has turbulence levels of less than 0.1% at all test conditions, based on hot-wire measurements.
Instrumentation / Equipment:
- Multiple 6-axis force and torque sensors capable of measuring time-varying/cyclical loads.
- Force measurement: 1/320-lbf to 1500-lbf
- Torque measurement: 1/2000-lbf-in to 3600-lbf-in
- Measurement frequency: 1.4kHz to 7.2kHz
- Four 16-port Scanivalve DSA3217-PTP differential pressure sensor arrays (two low-pressure and two high pressure).
- Low-pressure sensor: Max. 0.18-psi (Accuracy ±0.4% full scale)
- High-pressure sensor: Max. 2.5-psi (Accuracy ±0.08% full scale)
- Measurement frequency: 0.86kHz
- Twenty 5-psi differential Kulite surface-mounted, ultra-miniature pressure sensors.
- Two 1-torr pressure sensors.
- Standard hot-wire anemometer system.
- Qidi iFast high-precision 3D printer with dual independent extruders.
- Print volume: 13-in x 20-in x 12.5-in
- Print accuracy: 0.002-in
- Print material: PLA, ABS, CF reinforced PC, and nylon.
- Anycubic Photon M3 Max 3D printer.
- ELEGOO Saturn 4 Ultra 3D printer.
- Custom-built fast-response force and moment balance.
Anechoic Chamber
MSU’s 18-ft x 10-ft x 10-ft (length x width x height) anechoic chamber, located at the Raspet Flight Research Labs. The chamber provides an acoustically sterile volume with a noise floor of 11 dBA and exhibiting nearly anechoic conditions below 120 Hz.
Instrumentation / Equipment:
Motion Capture System
Located at the Autonomous Systems Research Laboratory, the OptiTrack motion-capture system is comprised of a set of twelve Primex 41 cameras with a resolution of 4.1 megapixels and frame rates reaching 250Hz. The testing area dimensions are 46-ft x 30-ft x 18.5-ft (length x width x height). Positional errors are less than ±0.004-in and rotational errors are below ±0.1 degree for a reference 30-ft x 30-ft tracking area.
High Performance Computing
Supported by MSU's High Performance Computing Collaboratory, our research group has access to the Shadow system for all computational research. Shadow is a Cray CS300-LC cluster with 4,800 Intel Ivy Bridge processor cores and 28,800 Intel Xeon Phi Shadow has a peak performance of 593 teraFLOPS (trillion calculations per second).
