Simulation of honeycomb–screen combinations for turbulence management in a subsonic wind tunnel

Honeycomb and screens, mainly used for turbulence reduction, are the key elements of a subsonic wind tunnel. In this paper, design aspects of these elements are addressed for an open-circuit wind tunnel, installed at Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati (IITG), India. The effectiveness of honeycomb and honeycomb–screen combinations, in reducing swirl and turbulence level in the test section, is studied by simulating the flowfield using commercial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) package ANSYS-CFX. RNG k−ε turbulence model, with scalable wall functions, is used for modeling turbulence. Results of these simulations for turbulence management, using honeycombs of different lengths, cell shapes and screens of different open area ratios, are found to be in good agreement with experimental and theoretical results available in open literature. These simulations have confirmed the methodology to be adopted for design of wind tunnel subsections. Thus validated design parameters have been used for fabricating the honeycomb and screens for the IITG wind tunnel.