14. Prospects and Challenges for Aerodynamics

The wind tunnel is a major constituent of a specialised infrastructure for research in aeronautics and aerospace. Its contribution and importance over-match the experimental facilities required in many other sectors for research and development. In the absence of a complete tool set to design next generation vehicles, the design cycle can only be matured through joint CFD simulation and wind tunnel testing, where the latter is able to represent most of the physical phenomena that could be encountered during operation. This is a major source of disparity between CFD and wind tunnel results as CFD is still unable to reproduce or model the exact physics usually due to limitations in the choice of boundary conditions and realistic computational time and cost.