Design and implementation of an Environmental Temperature Control Enclosure for an External Wind Tunnel Balance

Given the critical role of wind tunnel aerodynamic load measurement, the measuring balance is a so precise and sensitive instrument that even minors disturbance from the environment can introduce significant error. Therefore, the environment temperature must be accurately measured and controlled. This paper addresses the design of a prototype enclosure as a controlled environment for the external wind tunnel balance. The enclosure is designed with a top section equipped with light bulbs and two blowers and the bottom section with a temperature sensing panel. The two sections are separated by a wire mesh. This design uses the current air-conditioning system to maintain the environment temperature of the external wind tunnel balance. Arduino Uno has been used as the main controller of the temperature control system using PID gains to adjust the intensity of the light bulbs depending on the set-point. The controller has been designed for the enclosure to validate the design experiments. The design of the experiment results can give a clear indication of which factors and parameters have to be considered more than the other.