A Case Study of Application of Modern Design of Experiment Methods in High Speed Wind Tunnel Test

For the development trend of advanced aircraft wind tunnel tests which require shorter cycle time and lower cost, a new wind tunnel testing process called Modern Design of Experiments (MDOE) is under development at NASA Langley Research Center. This paper presents a case study of application of Modem Design of Experiment methods in high speed wind tunnel tests based on the aerodynamic data of certain type of aircrafts. The full process including experiment design, execution, analysis of variance, and block design is described. Comparisons between MDOE predictions and OFAT measurements were made in the present study. The results show that the MDOE methods have well predictive capability to meet specific test objectives with less data volume, less cost and less time compared to the conventional OFAT methods, which means the MDOE approach established and used in this study is feasible enough to meet specific aerodynamic wind tunnel testing objectives in place of conventional OFAT methods.