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ADCL Wind Tunnel — Operating & Contributor Manual

This manual is the single technical reference for the wind tunnel facility in the Aeronautics, Dynamics and Controls Laboratory (ADCL) at the University of California, Irvine. It covers the hardware chain, the control software, day-to-day operating procedures, and the maintenance practices needed to keep the facility working.

Audience

The manual is written for project contributors: anyone who will operate the tunnel beyond a one-off visit, modify the control software, recalibrate the system, or hand it off to the next student. If you only need to run an experiment safely, start with the Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) instead — it is a separate, operator-focused document with the safety checklist, emergency contacts, and the per-run sequence.

How to read this manual

The manual is task-oriented, not chronological. The milestone debug logs in WT_MS_<n>/ capture how the facility got into its current state; this manual captures what the current state is and what you should do with it.

A reasonable first read:

  1. Safety — non-negotiable. Read before touching anything.
  2. Hardware overview — the airflow path, the electrical chain, and the network topology in one diagram.
  3. Software architecture — when to use ADCL WinSoft, when to use WindTunnelControl.ps1, and why AeroWare is being retired.
  4. Pre-run checklist + Startup via ADCL WinSoft — the golden path for an experiment.

If something breaks, jump straight to Troubleshooting and the Reference section.

What's not in this manual

  • Per-experiment data analysis — that lives with each experiment, not in the facility manual.
  • CAD/model files for test articles — those live under models/ in the repository.
  • The milestone debug logs themselves — see WT_MS_<n>/debug_session.md. The manual references them for historical context but is not a copy of them.

How this manual is built

The source lives at docs/manual/content/ in the project repository. It is rendered as:

Both outputs come from the same Markdown files; there is no separate authoring step. See Software → Building & deploying for build instructions if you are picking this up after a git pull.