FACILITIES – Department of Aeronautical Engineering

Facilities

The lab courses included in the syllabus initiate a student to experimentally check the correctness of the analytical results studied in the theory courses and thus can be considered as the initial phase of practical.The lab facilities comprise of a subsonic open circuit wind tunnel, flow visualization facilities, a water table, hot-wire anemometry system, propeller test rig, experimental set up for measuring shear centre, torsion and bending stresses, diffused light polariscope for stress analysis, flame propagation apparatus and flight dynamics modelling& computational software (ANSYS student version) is available for mathematical modeling of aeronautical engineering problems. These are adequate to meet the course curriculum requirements of the ongoing B.Tech.(Aero) programme and to undertake very limited research work. The department also has certain aircraft assemblies, sub systems and instruments of a crashed frontline fighter aircraft, and models of various aircraft and jet-engine. The students assemble exotic configurations of aero-models and fly them so as to study the effect of aerodynamic features and structural integrity of such aircraft configurations. The computational facility in the department has specialized software like ANSYS and lab courses are also conducted on the use of modeling/ simulation software’s like, GAMBIT/ FLUENT, MATLAB, CATIA, and CREO. Broadly, the lab infrastructure can be categorized into seven specialization of aeronautical engg.

Basics of Aeronautical Engg lab
Aircraft Propulsion Lab
Aerodynamics Lab
Project Lab.
Aero modelling Lab.
Aircraft Structures and Materials Lab
Aeronautical Computational Lab

The faculty and students work in collaboration with other departments of FET. Other facilities include workshops and Laboratories for Energy Conversion, Fluid Mechanics, Measurements and Metrology, Materials Testing. Flight Simulation and AeromodellingLaboratories .

All the labs have various test equipment to conduct experiments as per the current curriculum.A brief description of existing laboratory facilities is given below.

Flight Simulation Lab. The flight simulator lab has capabilities to fly aero models of various types with the same type of transmitters in use by the students to learn take off and landing characteristics.

Structures Lab Facility

A state of the art Structures Laboratory includes test rigs that students use to study the structural analysis and design of an aircraft.

Propulsion Laboratory

Students and researchers use the propulsion laboratory to conduct experiments related to aircraft engines, force measurements through wall jets and measurement of speed of flame propagation.

Flight Computational Lab:- Computing facilities 25 High end Computers with Ansys (Academic Version), Creo Software, AutoCad Software packages.The Modeling and Simulation laboratory is equipped with software packages such as ANSYS Workbench, CFD Tools MATLAB and SIMULINK that are to students. Typical ANSYS/CFD analysis results for an airfoil are shown below:

Analysis using ANSYS WorkbenchMeshing improvements by grid generation

Suction type Subsonic Wind Tunnel

The Aerodynamics laboratory is well equipped with a Suction type Subsonic Wind Tunnel that is used to demonstrate the nature of flow using flow visualization techniques. The nature of pressure distribution over various body shapes such as symmetrical airfoils, asymmetrical airfoils, and cylinders can be studied. The Wind Tunnel is also fitted with a 3-Component Force Balance that can be used to study the lift, drag and pitching moments on airfoils at different angles of attack and flow velocities.