The overall goal of this activity is to significantly increase the knowledge gained from physical tests through the development of the state-of-the-technology simulators for the test facilities at NASA Langley.

Among the different applications of the simulators are:

• Interactive virtual tour, which includes
• Identifying the basic components of the test facility (their names and what each component does)
• Navigating through with voice, mouse and handheld devices (seamless transition between animations and QuickTime VR)
• Interactive tutorial - description of the operations. Also,
• Coupling the description with real-time visualization (photorealistic images)
• Interactive navigation (e.g., skip, repeat, etc.)
• Physical test simulation, including
• Use simulation for pretest planning and predicting the measurements
• Sensitivity analysis, to identify the major parameters affecting the test results, and to help in the design of intelligent experiments
• Interactive training of engineers and technicians, with emphasis on
• Training the novice
• Testing the trained learner—this includes scenarios of possible problems during the test
• Coupling physical experiments with simulation in either real-time or after the physical test to gain more insight, and to significantly increase the knowledge gained from the test. For the wind tunnels, this includes the study of
• Wall and support interference
• Flow angularity, and nonuniformity
• Adjustment from model scale to full scale

The NASA facilities considered in this project include six wind tunnels, (14 x 22 foot subsonic tunnel)

National Transonic facility

16-foot Transonic Tunnel

8-foot high-temperature tunnel

31 inch Mach 10 tunnel

Unitary plan wind tunnel

and the Langley full-scale tunnel, the aircraft landing dynamics facility, and the combined load test facility.