Wind-tunnel

After World War II

In the United States, many wind tunnels have been decommissioned from 1990 to 2010, including some historic facilities. Pressure is brought to bear on remaining wind tunnels due to declining or erratic usage, high electricity costs, and in some cases the high value of the real estate upon which the facility sits. On the other hand, CFD validation still requires wind-tunnel data, and this is likely to be the case for the foreseeable future. Studies have been done and others are underway to assess future military and commercial wind tunnel needs, but the outcome remains uncertain. More recently an increasing use of jet-powered, instrumented unmanned vehicles, or research drones, have replaced some of the traditional uses of wind tunnels. The world's fastest wind tunnel as of 2019 is the LENS-X wind tunnel, located in Buffalo, New York.