Aerodium Sigulda is a company based in Latvia, which owns and runs the first vertical wind tunnel in Eastern Europe. The wind tunnel is located near Sigulda, the most visited tourist area in Latvia. It is affiliated with Aerodium Technologies, a designer and producer of vertical wind tunnels. While being open to the public, it also serves as a testing base for new technologies and a training place for instructors.
In 2003 the Latvian entrepreneur Ivars Beitāns decided to elaborate on the wind tunnel concept and by summer 2005 the first wind tunnel was opened in Sigulda. [1] It was an open wall-less tunnel installed outdoors reaching a wind speed of 200 km/h with a diameter of 3.7 meters.[ citation needed ]
In the "Sigulda county's man of the year 2005" competition, Beitāns was awarded in the category "For contribution to development of Sigulda county" and Aerodium won an award in the nomination "For the investment in county's community life". [2] More importantly, having a wind tunnel allowed Ivars Beitāns and his friends to train for the Torino 2006 Olympic games, where Aerodium surprised the world with a flying snowboarder performance in an open tunnel at the closing ceremony. For this purpose, Sigulda's wind tunnel had to be sent over to Italy in February 2006.[ citation needed ]
On May 3, 2017, a new generation open wind tunnel replaced the already outdated first model. [3] It features air velocity of 215 km/h and a 2.8 meters flying zone. [4] Major improvements were made towards ensuring safety by expanding the safety net and adding very safe, custom-built safety cushions. [5] Aerodium also managed to significantly lower the noise emissions, which allows this technology to be operated in urban areas. [6]
Wind tunnels are large tubes with air blowing through them which are used to replicate the interaction between air and an object flying through the air or moving along the ground. Researchers use wind tunnels to learn more about how an aircraft will fly. NASA uses wind tunnels to test scale models of aircraft and spacecraft. Some wind tunnels are large enough to contain full-size versions of vehicles. The wind tunnel moves air around an object, making it seem as if the object is flying.
The Ames Research Center (ARC), also known as NASA Ames, is a major NASA research center at Moffett Federal Airfield in California's Silicon Valley. It was founded in 1939 as the second National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) laboratory. That agency was dissolved and its assets and personnel transferred to the newly created National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) on October 1, 1958. NASA Ames is named in honor of Joseph Sweetman Ames, a physicist and one of the founding members of NACA. At last estimate NASA Ames had over US$3 billion in capital equipment, 2,300 research personnel and a US$860 million annual budget.
The history of aviation extends for more than two thousand years, from the earliest forms of aviation such as kites and attempts at tower jumping to supersonic and hypersonic flight by powered, heavier-than-air jets.
The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) was a United States federal agency founded on March 3, 1915, to undertake, promote, and institutionalize aeronautical research. On October 1, 1958, the agency was dissolved and its assets and personnel were transferred to the newly created National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). NACA is an initialism, i.e., pronounced as individual letters, rather than as a whole word.
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In common usage, wind gradient, more specifically wind speed gradient or wind velocity gradient, or alternatively shear wind, is the vertical component of the gradient of the mean horizontal wind speed in the lower atmosphere. It is the rate of increase of wind strength with unit increase in height above ground level. In metric units, it is often measured in units of meters per second of speed, per kilometer of height (m/s/km), which reduces to the standard unit of shear rate, inverse seconds (s−1).
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In meteorology, the planetary boundary layer (PBL), also known as the atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) or peplosphere, is the lowest part of the atmosphere and its behaviour is directly influenced by its contact with a planetary surface. On Earth it usually responds to changes in surface radiative forcing in an hour or less. In this layer physical quantities such as flow velocity, temperature, and moisture display rapid fluctuations (turbulence) and vertical mixing is strong. Above the PBL is the "free atmosphere", where the wind is approximately geostrophic, while within the PBL the wind is affected by surface drag and turns across the isobars.
Early flying machines include all forms of aircraft studied or constructed before the development of the modern aeroplane by 1910. The story of modern flight begins more than a century before the first successful manned aeroplane, and the earliest aircraft thousands of years before.
ICAD is a knowledge-based engineering (KBE) system that enables users to encode design knowledge using a semantic representation that can be evaluated for Parasolid output. ICAD has an open architecture that can utilize all the power and flexibility of the underlying language.
The Closing Ceremony of the 2006 Winter Olympics took place on 26 February 2006 beginning at 20:00 CET (UTC+1) at the Stadio Olimpico in Turin, Italy.
A vertical wind tunnel (VWT) is a wind tunnel that moves air up in a vertical column. Unlike standard wind tunnels, which have test sections that are oriented horizontally, as experienced in level flight, a vertical orientation enables gravity to be countered by drag instead of lift, as experienced in an aircraft spin or by a skydiver at terminal velocity.
The Bell XV-3 is an American tiltrotor aircraft developed by Bell Helicopter for a joint research program between the United States Air Force and the United States Army in order to explore convertiplane technologies. The XV-3 featured an engine mounted in the fuselage with driveshafts transferring power to two-bladed rotor assemblies mounted on the wingtips. The wingtip rotor assemblies were mounted to tilt 90 degrees from vertical to horizontal, designed to allow the XV-3 to take off and land like a helicopter but fly at faster airspeeds, similar to a conventional fixed-wing aircraft.
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Jon Anders Olsson Delér is a professional freeskier and alpine ski racer from Sweden. Born in Mora, Olsson Delér started his career as a ski racer but at age 16 he switched his race skis for twin tips and quit ski racing. Eight years later, after a 50 000 SEK (US$5826.22) bet with fellow skier Jens Byggmark, Olsson Delér started ski racing again with the goal of the bets being to make it to the Olympics in 2014. He now competes in both freestyle and ski racing. Olsson Delér is known for his invention of several new double flips, including a D-spin 720 into a flatspin 540, a switch double rodeo 1080, a double flatspin 900, and a switch cork 720 to flatspin 540.
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Aerodium is a designer and producer of vertical wind tunnels based in Riga, Latvia. Its core business is related to sales and rent of wind tunnels for entertainment and military industries, but it also operates different locations under franchise. A second part is connected to organizing shows and performances for brand promotion, festivals and other celebrations around the world.
The Wind Engineering, Energy and Environment (WindEEE) Dome is a hexagonal-shaped vertical wind tunnel proposed for the University of Western Ontario. It is designed to simulate localized, high-intensity wind patterns such as downbursts and tornadoes that have never been studied before.
Shearwater Research is a Canadian manufacturer of dive computers and rebreather electronics for technical diving.
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