AEDC reactivates technology sharing agreement with France

  • Published
  • By Philip Lorenz III
  • AEDC/PA
Arnold Air Force Base, Tenn. --  Approximately one year ago, Tom Best, Arnold Engineering Development Center's (AEDC) technical director of the plans and programs directorate, realized there was an excellent opportunity to make an upcoming collaborative European visit with two technology partners even more productive.

Best said a group from AEDC, including himself, was already planning to pay a visit to Arnold's ground testing counterparts in the Netherlands and Germany to explore collaborative opportunities as part of ongoing data exchange agreements with both countries.

"We [also] have an official data exchange agreement between the Air Force and ONERA [Office National d'Etudes et Recherches Aérospatiales], the French national aerospace research center," he explained. "However, that agreement is quite old - it was formed in 1971 and it had become kind of dormant."

Best said it occurred to him that it made sense to make the trip more productive by initiating a meeting between AEDC's counterparts at the French ground testing complex to reactivate that agreement and explore potential future collaborative opportunities.

"Under data exchange agreements, we share information on what we're doing well, what they're doing well, so that we can learn something from each other," he said. "But it also gives you the opportunity to consider doing more detailed collaboration and that's the way we always end our meetings.

"I was very impressed with their wind tunnels and their people," he added. "They're not behind the U.S., they're our peers with this kind of stuff."

Best emphasized that the reactivation of the data exchange agreement between the two countries was the right thing to do, but acknowledged it is premature to draw conclusions to where that process may lead.

AEDC has official data exchange agreements with other countries, too, but Best said the work already accomplished with one of the center's European counterparts has already paid dividends for all concerned.

"We have two examples of collaboration with Germany that are worth mentioning," he said. "[One is] the TST [Transonic Technology Wing Demonstrator] model that was tested in Europe, NASA and AEDC back in the 1990's where we compared wind tunnel data and CFD [computational fluid dynamics]."

The TST was also known as the German Dornier Alpha jet.

"There was also flight test data on the TST configuration," he continued. "All of us leaned lots from those tests about wind tunnel effects on data and about extrapolating wind tunnel data to flight."

Best said the second example was AEDC's collaboration on data comparisons between the G-Range free-piston shock tunnel configuration and the High-Enthalpy Shock Tunnel Göttingen (HEG) in Germany.

"We all learned a lot about diagnostic tools that work in that regime and how the flow can be contaminated with the driver gas," he explained.

The HEG of the German Aerospace Center is one of the major European hypersonic test facilities.